Archive for the ‘Morphology’ Category
August 18, 2023
A typo in writing — CARPTENTER, with an anticipation of the T in CARPENTER — which was then not caught by a proofreader, so that it got published looking like CARP-TENTER ‘someone or something for tenting carp’, but written solid. Exposed by Michael Palmer on Facebook on 8/15. The published display, with the beginning of the accompanying news article:
US Senator Sherrod Brown August 15 at 11:09 AM: Today our Butch Lewis Act saved the pensions of 5,400 carpenters in Southwest Ohio, restoring full benefits with NO cuts. When work has dignity, workers can take comfort that the pensions they’ve earned over a lifetime will be there for them when they retire
And then, of course, the playful Facebook comments, starting with Michael Palmer’s initial salvo:
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Posted in Compounds, Errors, Homosexuality, Masculinity, Punctuation, Semantics of compounds, Silliness, Typos | Leave a Comment »
August 15, 2023
Provoked by the Merriam-Webster site‘s “Words We’re Watching: ‘Nibling’: An efficient word for your sibling’s kids”: some reflections on the portmanteauing that gives rise to nibling ‘niece or nephew, sibling’s child’; on “having a word for X in language L”; and on neologism and its discontents.
First, the fun. There’s a book for kids, and there’s a t-shirt for kids, too.
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Posted in Books, Categorization and Labeling, Clothing, Compounds, Derivation, Gender and sexuality, Lexical semantics, Lexicography, Naming, Portmanteaus, Trade names | 6 Comments »
August 13, 2023
The donut burger is the centerpiece of a photo on Jenny Marinello’s Facebook page on 8/5, from the Ohio State Fair (the booth in the photo also touts Philly fries and butt fries, which will require some explication for many readers). The sign on the booth reassures us that these are real, fresh donuts, and we are in fact looking at shamelessly sweet and sticky glazed donuts here, not some earnest wimpy-hippie fried dough:
The DONUT BURGER, a burger with doughnuts for buns: not, it turns out, just some freakish state fair attraction, but a genuine cultural thing
Now, brief notes: on hybrid food, with and without portmanteau names (the donut burger currently lacks one); and then on six places around the SF BayArea where you can get donut burgers (the glazed donut as bun is standard). So far as I know, they aren’t available in chain burger places, and the fashion for them might pass, but then again they might be a coming thing.
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Posted in Language and food, Names, Naming, Portmanteaus | 2 Comments »
August 11, 2023
In the current issue of the New Yorker, in the Talk of the Town section, a Paris Postcard by Lauren Collins: on-line on 8/7, with the title “Bartender, There’s a Beer in My Wine: Paris has been blanketed by posters for vière, a mix of vin and bière drunk from a wineglass, whose name, its creators say, started out as a joke”; in print on 8/14, with the title “Vière here” — about the hybrid beverage with a portmanteau name. Beginning:
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Posted in French, Language and food, Portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »
August 9, 2023
(Intimate talk about male bodies, mostly mine, in plain terms, though not so racy as to ban kids — but I will freely use the vernacular noun and verb piss, nouns dick and balls. In any case, some people will find the topic of crotch odor unsavory.)
I’d hoped to be able to post about meat dreams and crotch pong on the same day — just for the sound of the two off-color compounds together, but meat dreams took a lot longer than I’d expected (I somehow ended up in the 16th century), so crotch pong had to wait a day. So it goes.
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Posted in Alliteration, Assonance, Clothing, Compounds, Dialects, Language and the body, Language of sex, My life, Signs and symbols, Slang, Smell, Taboo language and slurs, Underwear | 1 Comment »
August 8, 2023
Not manmeat dreams, which I have all the time, usually quite pleasantly, my desires being inclined that way. But slabs-of-meat dreams, all through last night’s sleep. Not distressing, but inescapable: a continuing presentation of one piece of raw animal flesh after another, with titles out of Monty Python, things like:
#10, the breast of chicken; #45, the ham hock; #17, the pork loin; #99, the strip of bacon; #4, the leg of lamb; #57, the veal cutlet; #62, the porterhouse steak
I kept thinking: these are all really important, I’ve got to write them all down. But it was all in my head, where there’s no place to write things down. Frustrating.
When I eventually woke fully, at 1 am, I realized that my subconscious was sending me a message: IT’S TIME TO START EATING REAL MEAT. My subconscious was firmly convinced that my body had recovered sufficiently from my gall bladder surgery (almost 2 months ago) to cope with the full range of food. It was now shouting at me: GET ON WITH IT, DUDE!
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Posted in Art, Beheading, Language and animals, Language and food, My life | Leave a Comment »
August 8, 2023
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, a complex composition in which two centipedes look for bar snacks:
(#1) First bit of language play: the portmanteau barthropod = bar + arthropod, centipedes being arthropods, creatures in the gigantic phylum Arthropoda — also encompassing insects (including silverfish and springtails as well as flies, butterflies and moths, beetles, and more), spiders. crustaceans (among them, shrimp, crabs, lobsters, and barnacles), and millipedes (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
Then there’s a more subtle bit of language play in silverfish serving as bar snacks in a world in which centipedes drink in bars — given that Goldfish crackers (gold fish, silver fish, bring out the bronze) are often served as bar snacks in the real world.
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Posted in Compounds, Language and animals, Language and food, Language and gender, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Portmanteaus, Spelling | Leave a Comment »
August 5, 2023
Georgia Morgan (now retired from linguistics in Brattleboro VT, where she creates and sells amazing jewelry) on Facebook on 8/3:
— GM: I will be at the Brattleboro Area Farmers’ Market this Saturday in the Rosie’s Wonders booth. Bringing these, and lots more …
(#1) Including this peapod pendant
— AZ: Love the peapod. I would wear that (except that I can no longer manage any kind of jewelry with my poor disabled hands)
— GM > AZ: If you ever want one, I do make pendants with an adjustable sliding closure that just go on over your head
— AZ > GM: Georgia, if you can do that for the peapod, I want one.
And it has been done. Georgia is working on the pendant; the check is in the mail. It’s my birthday present to myself; I have a prime birthday, my 83rd (I still can’t quite believe that I have somehow managed to live this long) in a month from now, 9/6.
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Posted in Art, Compounds, It's Just Stuff, Language and food, Language and the body, My life, Signs and symbols, Spelling | Leave a Comment »
August 3, 2023
(From a while back, but this exchange, on a very small bit of usage, between SRA (Stephen R. Anderson, the Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics Emeritus at Yale University, now living in North Carolina) and AMZ (me), came during various medical crises on my part, so never got posted. But now …)
The usage issue set out in 7/18 e-mail from SRA to AMZ:
I guess lots of people send you weird things they saw online for commentary. Let me join that crowd.
In a story today on NPR about the soldier (apparently on his way to discipline on an assault charge) who ran across the demilitarized zone in Panmunjom into the arms of the North Koreans, we read that
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said he expected to have more information on the man in the coming hours and days.
“I’m absolutely foremost concerned about the welfare of our troop,” he told reporters during a Tuesday briefing, offering little other information than what has already been confirmed.
He obviously is referring to this individual guy as the troop he’s concerned about. I can’t find any instances of troop as a singular referring to an individual and not a group, but I’m not all that good at Google-searching for that kind of thing. The singular exists, of course, but it’s not the singular of [our] troops. Is this somehow a usage in the military?
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Posted in Count & Mass, Morphology, Morphology and syntax | 3 Comments »
July 29, 2023
From Tim Evanson (in Cleveland OH) on Facebook this morning:
Whew, it’s muggy out here….
I’ll get to the weather in Cleveland in a little while, but first, about the word muggy.
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Posted in Etymology, Portmanteaus | 2 Comments »
