Archive for the ‘Morphology’ Category

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Obscure plurals of octopus (and rhinoceros)

November 21, 2023

A brief, somewhat goofy spin-off from my 11/18 posting “The visiopun”, about plurals of the English noun octopus, which entertained mostly octopi (borrowing the Latin plural, but giving it an English spelling-pronunciation /áktǝpàj/) and octopuses (with the default plural suffix for English nouns), but also entertaining octopodes (borrowed from Classical Greek, so learnèd and obscure). The posting inspired a Facebook exchange today, starting with:

— Gadi Niram: I love the [four-syllable] plural octopodes, but it’s really not suited to most communication.

To which I replied:

— AZ >  GN (amplifying on GN’s reservations): It has the primary accent on the second syllable: òctópodes, like àntípodes. … At first I was hoping for óctopòdes or òctopódes, cleaving more closely to the accent pattern of óctopùs. But reality is weirder than that.

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Posted in Accent, Borrowing, Greek, Historical linguistics, Inflection | 1 Comment »

The visiopun

November 18, 2023

… visiopun being my coinage referring to a punning word presented visually — not actually said or printed, but alluded to by some striking image, usually with some lead-on hinting at the pun. An extremely simple, utterly flat-footed example of my own devising:

What do you call a US infantryman from World War I?

(#1)

The image is of a small male figure made of dough, so the punning word is doughboy. (Yes, the Pillsbury Doughboy. I simplified things by using an existing image.)

Now to a complex visiopun passed on to me on Facebook today by Emily Menon Bender (the source is cited in the image):

(#2)

The image is of a pie in the shape of an octopus, so the punning word is octopie (/áktǝpàj/ in my AmE variety), a play on octopi, one of the plural forms of octopus. Cute.

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Posted in Etymology, Inflection, Lexicography, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Usage advice, Usage attitudes | 1 Comment »

Ditto ditto my song

November 17, 2023

A serenade on my Apple Music in the dark night of 10/13, Danny Kaye singing Gilbert & Sullivan patter songs, with warmth rather than the sharp edges of the D’Oyly Carte patter specialists; at my 2 am whizz break, he had arrived at the Lord Chancellor’s “Nightmare Song”, from G&S’s Iolanthe, with its concluding:

the night has been long —
ditto ditto my song —
and thank goodness
they’re both of them over!

Being (more or less relentlessly) a linguist, I asked myself, not for the first time: What kind of word is ditto? It looks a lot like some kind of adverb here, with the crucial line paraphrasable as (awkward) thus thus my song, or (better) also also my song, or (even better) so too my song. (Although you might argue that ditto‘s a special kind of noun, since it’s paraphrasable as the same.) And, while we’re on the subject: Where on earth does it come from? I entertained speculations about some connection to double, maybe Greek di– ‘two’, or possibly to dot, given ditto marks.

My etymological speculations are provably off-base; the closest English words are diction and dictate, from the Latin stem dict– ‘say’. Meanwhile, my off-the-cuff part-of-speech assignment is flatly contradicted by the authority I look at first, NOAD (a lexicographically respectable dictionary of manageable size, and — unlike AHD or the M-W dictionaries — one accessible directly from my browser). NOAD is based on the resources of the OED, and the OED (which I can access on-line) on ditto classifies the word as a noun — but in an entry from well over a century ago, so we need to look critically at its evidence for this classification. Which shows that in the 18th century the word was incontestably a noun (with a plural dittoes). That usage, however, is long dead. The question is what to say about modern usage, and there my adverb idea has a lot going for it (and is also the classification given in Merriam-Webster’s word history for modern ditto).

So we’re in for a bumpy ride, much like the Lord Chancellor’s, with possibly more questions than answers. Hang on.

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Posted in Conversion, Etymology, Grammatical categories, Language change, Lexical semantics, Lexicography, Music, My life, Performance, Trade names, Verbing | 4 Comments »

The punmanteau

November 15, 2023

Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro hinges on a bit of language play that cuts across two categories of play: it’s a pun based on a portmanteau, a punmanteau:


(#1) A cummerbund in the shape of a Bundt cake (Bundt punning on bund), with a name that’s a portmanteau of the names for those two things: cummerbund + Bundt (cake) = cummerbundt (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)

(Note: The Cumberbatch is something else entirely.)

(Further note: Wayno’s title for this one is “Frosted Formalism”, alluding to the icing (aka frosting) on the cummerbundt in the cartoon — though Bundt cakes are not necessarily frosted.)

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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Clothing, Language and culture, Language and food, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Puns | 2 Comments »

From the Harry Pottery Barn

October 13, 2023

In today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon, really wizard vases from the Harry Pottery Barn:


A POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) Harry Pottery = Harry Potter + Pottery: vases in the style of J. K. Rowling (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page)

(plus my play on wizard in really wizard vases. From NOAD:

adj. wizard: British informal, dated wonderful; excellent: how absolutely wizard! | I’ve just had a wizard idea.

A little pun to go along with the extra POP in the Pottery Barn reference.)

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Posted in Books, Linguistics in the comics, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Puns | Leave a Comment »

wine : oenophile :: beer : X

September 26, 2023

We start with wine, a drink whose enthusiasts, knowledgable fans, aficionados, connoisseurs, and the like are legion, so not surprisingly we have a name for them, with alternative spellings: oenophiles / enophiles. Beer is equally appreciated and enjoyed by many, but there are relatively few beer connoisseurs. But, even if there are few of them, they presumably have a name — maybe an obscure one, but a name nevertheless. What’s the solution to this proportional equation?

wine : oenophile :: beer : X

It turns out that there are (at least) two solutions for X, one Latin-based (like vinophile for wine, which is so rare that it doesn’t make it even into the OED), the other Greek-based like oenophile (Greek to accord with the Greek second element –phile). You’re unlikely to have come across either of them, but the second, Greek-based one, is especially delicious for me, because it’s a Z -word (like Zwicky), and because it came to me through a Facebook friend, Martyn Cornell.

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Posted in Compounds, Greek, Language and food, Spelling | 3 Comments »

Morning wood word

September 18, 2023

(Brief but penis-dense, so not to everyone’s  taste; there are, alas, no images)

My morning name today — a natural for someone as phallically oriented as I am — was pillicock, according to the OED (revised 2006), an archaic BrE word for the penis. A penis word that actually vanished, as a reference to the male organ or any semantic development from that. This despite the fact that it truly contained cock ‘penis’ (the pilli part is etymologically obscure).

(Irrelevantly, my mind went on a dactylic jaunt — pillicock, petticoat, billygoat, jerry-built, marzipan — and from there to a delicious double dactyl, marzipan pillicock. A majestic almond-candy phallus; no doubt someone actually makes these. Or perhaps a sweet-tongued prick, that lying seducer Don Juan in his guise as Captain Marzipan Pillicock.)

I would have expected pillicock to have gone the way of pillock (entirely of obscure etymology), which the OED (revised 2006) tells us started out as

Originally Scottish. The penis. Now English regional (northern) and rare. [1st cite 1568]

But mostly went the way of prick and dick and putz and others in various languages, which went bad, went downhill semantically: pillock has ended up as

Chiefly British colloquial (mildly derogatory). A stupid person; a fool, an idiot. [1st cite 1967]

(And yes, morning wood word is an odd portmanteau of morning wood and morning word. Leading, I suppose, to thoughts of morning wood word and burn stein, morning burn being a novel alternative to razor burn. Ok, I’ll stop.)

Posted in Language and the body, Language of sex, Language play, Morning names, Poetic form, Portmanteaus, Puns | 1 Comment »

Original Rockers

September 16, 2023

“Original Rockers”: Wayno’s title for yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro; the published title “AC/BC” is a pun on the name AC/DC (for the rock band), cavemen being from a great many years BCE


(#1) Lead guitar with caveman backup (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

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Posted in Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Names, Portmanteaus, Puns | 1 Comment »

Manscape architects

September 6, 2023

The background, from 9/3 in my posting “Manscaping your junk”:

A tv spot ad (only 15 seconds long) for the Gillette Intimate Manscape Kit (Gillette Intimate Pubic Hair Trimmer, Gillette Intimate Pubic Hair Razor, Gillette Intimate Pubic Shave Cream + Cleanser), released at least twice, under different titles:


(#1) The Gillette Intimate Manscape Kit

— ‘It’s Not Junk, so Treat It Right’  [apparently it’s your “pubic region” instead], published 10/31/22

— “Respect Your Junk!”, published 3/11/23

Two matters of linguistic interest here: the noun manscaping and verb manscape; and the noun junk ‘male genitals’. The material I’ve collected on these is extensive enough that I’m not going to try to cram it all into one posting, but will split things in two, in follow-up postings on the noun junk and on the noun manscaping / the verb manscape.

The first of these I did two days go (on 9/4), in my posting “From the genital junkyard”. Today it’s manscaping day. Just to remind you, my focus is on vocabulary — the noun manscaping and the verb manscape — not on the practices this vocabulary refers to, of trimming, shaving, and removing male pubic hair.

Nevertheless, the practices provide the background, so a few words on them are in order.

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Posted in Language and the body, Lexical semantics, Portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »

From the annals of political portmanteauing

August 25, 2023

(This is very much a Mary, Queen of Scots, Not Dead Yet posting — coming after two days in which I was almost totally felled by the humid heat we’ve been experiencing (though I did get in a much-needed shower at 2 in the morning yesterday), and barely functioned. All this sadly in utter solitude: not a word with another human being between two exchanges with caregivers, on Saturday morning and yesterday afternoon.)

… with a note on Stanley Kubrick’s directorial techniques.

First, Don Boorleone.

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Posted in Facial expressions, Language and politics, Movies and tv, Names, Portmanteaus | 1 Comment »

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