Archive for the ‘Morphology’ Category
August 9, 2024
The New Yorker cover for the August 12th, 2024 issue is a great big Roz Chast cartoon. With the accompanying cover story, “Roz Chast’s “Flavor of the Week”: The artist’s enticing (and not so enticing) tweaks to one of summer’s enduring pleasures” by Françoise Muhly on 8/5/24:
(#1) Along with plain Vanilla, there are strangely modified real flavors, in it for the alliteration (Microchip Mint, First Avenue Fudge); actual food names not especially attractive in an ice cream (Lard Swirl, Hardtack, the potato variety Yukon Gold); and lots of totally non-food allusive names (Placebo, Bitcoin, Tumbleweed, Amnesia, Tsunami, and the noble gas Xenon)
For the cover of the August 12, 2024, issue, the cartoonist Roz Chast — who has delighted readers since 1978 with her opinionated and peculiar takes on life’s indignities — gives ice-cream makers some suggestions for new flavors. “There are a lot of things I like about ice-cream stores aside from the ice cream itself,” Chast said. “I like looking at the different colors and patterns of all the bins. I like comparing cones: wafer flat-bottom or pointy classic? And the names of the flavors: the more preposterous and baroque, the better.”
(There’s a Page on this blog with links to my postings about Roz Chast and her work)
Preposterous and baroque naming schemes run riot in several domains: famously, for colors, especially of paints and of fabrics; and then widely in the word of ice cream flavors, where many frozen-confection firms exult in their naming practices. I’ll comment on just three US companies, with three different approaches: Häagen-Dazs, Baskin-Robbins, and Ben & Jerry’s.
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Posted in Alliteration, Allusion, Art, Color, Language and food, Naming, Portmanteaus, Puns, Quotation, Rhyme, Taste, Trade names | 3 Comments »
August 8, 2024
An alert yesterday from Ernesto Cuba about the Homosaurus project: an LGBT thesaurus, with a portmanteau name
homosaurus = homo(sexual) + thesaurus — thesaurus from Ancient Greek, meaning ‘treasure, storehouse’
and a logo featuring a mascot apatosaurus (aka brontosaurus):
(#1) The Homosaurus mascot is a huge but herbivorous (hence unthreatening, user-friendly) dinosaur, and it comes with an accompanying Pride rainbow
— all these creatures with names incorporating the formative saur(us) (ultimately from Greek again, and meaning ‘lizard, reptile’ ), utterly unrelated to thesaurus but irresistible as a source of verbal and visual play, as in #1.
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Posted in Homosexuality, Language and animals, Logos, Mascots, Portmanteaus, Rainbow, Resources | 1 Comment »
August 7, 2024
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, in which a prince grouses, over a tipple, about his amatory career, to a nobleman, one of his courtiers:
It seems the prince was once a frog and could rake in the chicks with nothing more than a few commanding ribbits; those were the days of easy scores (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
What do women want?, the princel wonders with a whine, recalling that once upon a time a short squat body, moist smooth skin, and long hind legs for leaping used to drive them into an osculatory frenzy. It’s all so damn unfair. (Wayno’s title for the cartoon: “Unhappy Ending”.)
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Posted in Clothing, Comic conventions, Costumes, Folklore, Hats, Language and animals, Portmanteaus, Stories | Leave a Comment »
July 22, 2024
For Pied-Piping Day — see my 7/23/13 posting “Pied-Piping Day”, on 7/22 as Ratcatcher’s Day (cue the Pied Piper of Hamelin), with a discussion of pied-piping in syntax — the wonderful French-English pun Philippe Philoppe:
(#1) Punnng on flip-flop ‘a light sandal, typically of plastic or rubber, with a thong between the big and second toe’ (of imitative origin) (NOAD) — currently being passed around on Facebook (I got it first from Susan Fischer yesterday)
As a jokey bonus, the image is a portrait of an actual Philippe — Philippe I, Duc d’Orléans [known as le Petit Monsieur or simply Monsieur] (from Wikipedia: (21 September 1640 – 9 June 1701) the younger son of King Louis XIII of France and Anne of Austria, and the younger brother of King Louis XIV) — as painted by Pierre Mignard (from Wikipedia: (17 November 1612 – 30 May 1695) … a French painter known for his religious and mythological scenes and portraits).
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Posted in Art, Compounds, French, Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Syntax | Leave a Comment »
July 19, 2024
From Ruth Lawrence on Facebook yesterday, a version of these meat-shoe photos, which had come to her on the net (the way things are customarily passed around, without sourcing):
(#1) The meat shoes
But since what #1 depicts is clearly the (most entertaining) referent of the POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau)
beef Wellington boots = beef Wellington (the food preparation) + Wellington boots (the footwear), referring to (simulacra of) Wellington boots fashioned from beef Wellington
I could quickly track them down to a source —
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Posted in Art, Language and food, Language and the body, Names, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Shoes | 2 Comments »
July 19, 2024
Two Datoro cartoons from the July 22nd New Yorker (the one with Anita Kunz’s “The Face of Justice” — six 45s and three women — on the cover): Joe Dator offering goldfish snacks in a cat bar, Tom Toro offering a summer food pun with a dubious union between plant and animal (interkingdom breeding! quelle scandale!).
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Posted in Ambiguity, Idioms, Jokes, Language and animals, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Portmanteaus, Puns, Trade names, Understanding comics | 3 Comments »
June 28, 2024
Passed on by Susan Fischer yesterday, this item from the We Love PUNS site:
(#1) Three things you need to know about or recognize to understand the pun joke here: Vladimir Putin (depicted here without a label); Ritz crackers (this is easy, because the name Ritz is on the package, as are images of the crackers); and, crucially, the model for the pun: the song title “Puttin’ on the Ritz”
Which gives us, oh groan, the pun Putin on the Ritz. Phonologically imperfect in the Putin part: pun /pútǝn/ for model puttin’ /pÚtǝn/. You can imagine other possibilities: poutine on / in the Ritz, pootin’ on / in the Ritz, button on the Ritz, and more with Ritz; still others involving tits, fritz, Rit (the commercial dye), and no doubt others.
It turns out that this is not the first appearance, on this blog, of Vlad the Invader with Ritz crackers. Nor the first pun involving Ritz. But first a lexical note on ritz, from NOAD:
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Posted in Idioms, Jokes, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Portmanteaus, Puns, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
June 22, 2024
Antipodal reduplicative flowering just down the street from me in Palo Alto, discovered on Thursday on a little neighborhood exploration with León Hernández Alvarez (hereafter, LH). A gorgeous display of an exotic plant in the otherwise featureless recessed back entrance of a company that’s sandwiched between my condo complex and the one to the south.
Here’s the building:
(#1) 744 Ramona St. (from Google maps), with nothing inside or outside of the building
And the plant in bloom (quite a surprise in the context of #1):
(#2) A mass planting along paths in the Sydney, Australia, Botanic Gardens (from the GardensOnline site); at 744 Ramona, it’s a somewhat smaller planting in a big pot, but still quite stunning
So, four things: the plant, Arthropodium cirratum, native to New Zealand; the location in my neighborhood, 744 Ramona St. (the backdoor to 745 Emerson St., which runs all the way through the block); my little venture around the block, the first in many months; and LH, in a return engagement as my all–around homecare person (well, for 4 hours a week).
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Posted in Language and plants, Morphology, My life, Palo Alto | Leave a Comment »
June 18, 2024
(Tasteless and obscene, in two languages, so not to everyone’s taste)
(#1) A rainbow raised fist, representing proud defiance; image from Redbubble, by designer MAS-S (in Berlin, Germany)
And now the frocio ‘queer, homo, faggot, fairy, queen’ mock-Pope intoning benedico questa frociata ‘I bless this faggotry’ (more literally, ‘this faggoting’) at the 6/15 Pride celebration in Rome, where t-shirts proclaimed “There is never too much frociaggine” — never too much faggotry — as participants enthusiastically embraced every vulgar insult they know (but especially frociaggine), turning them into proud badges of identity and defiance, raising the rainbow fist:
(#2) (photo from the National Catholic Reporter on 6/16/24)
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Posted in Derivation, Etymology, Homosexuality, Italian, Language and religion, Language and sexuality, Morphology, Playful morphology, Rainbow, Signs and symbols, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | 1 Comment »
May 25, 2024
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro is a little treasure chest of interesting morphosemantics, all from a pun on marine biologist, whose everyday use is to refer to a scientist specializing in marine biology:
But instead we get, unexpectedly, a biologist who is a marine, assigned to duty monitoring aquatic animals (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
The pun has the USMC noun marine; its base has the sea adjective marine. But that’s just the beginning of the fun.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, Constructions, Derivation, Linguistics in the comics, Modification, Morphology and syntax, Puns | 3 Comments »
