#4 in my “Squid Pro Quo” posting is from Marcus Connor’s Brainless Tales, a new webcomic for me, but one largely devoted to language play. And immediately I came across this cartoon, with a portmanteau noun denoting a hybrid, doubly phallic, foodstuff:
(#1)
baniener = banana + wiener, denoting a decidedly louche anthromorphized banana-wiener. Hey, baby, wanna dance?
It started with my observing to a friend that a container in which a blue cheese had been stored can be used to start “blu(e)ing” any cheese, citing the blue cheddar I had recently created in my refrigerator. And then this friend went off to buy some cheese for me, and came across some blue jack, a blue version of Monterey Jack. Jack is a mild cheese that has the virtue of being sliceable, and sliceable blue cheeses aren’t easy to come by (most blue cheeses crumble or shatter), so blue jack could be a good find. And so it was:
(#1)
Two cartoons to end the week: a Rhymes With Orange with a four-word play and a Bizarro with a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau):
(#1)
The Cantonese American dish moo goo gai pan ‘chicken with button mushrooms and sliced vegetables’, with a pun on each word: onomatopoetic moo, onomatopoetic goo, the informal noun guy, the Greek god Pan.
(#2)
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
Doctors Without Borders + Border Collie(s).
(Note that there are a lot of things you need to know to appreciate these comics.)
From Chris Hansen on Facebook, a late entry in this year’s Easter Peepstakes: a model who dreamt he played with yellow Peeps in his Aronik swimwear:
(#1)
About the company, its products, its models, its symbol, and its name
Link from Alon Lischinsky to this Dinosaur Comics (BROS OF HISTORY) on the 5th:
A festival of broplay, with word substitutions (bros for forefathers, bros for men, bro down on them for fight them) and bromanteaus (Brotus = bro + Brutus, brostravaganza = bro + extravaganza, brofore = bro + before, broversight = bro + oversight). And then there’s Edgar Allan Bro.
(This Dinosair Comics led me to another, from the 3rd, on hyperbaton, which will (remarkably) lead us into men’s bodies and mansex.)
… and other flowers. The plants come into bloom on a schedule that’s some complex of day length and temperature. Locally we’ve been having stretches of late cold weather (“patchy morning frost in low-lying areas”, the weather forecasts will say), so some plants are on the late side. Out my front door: the calla lilies are just now opening up, and the Victorian box — Pittosporum — hasn’t yet come into fragrant bloom. (For enthusiasts of resembloid composites: calla lilies aren’t lilies (Lilium), and Victorial box isn’t any kind of box (Buxus); see my 3/17/12 St. Patrick’s Day posting.) But the first narcissus bloomed in January, and a visit with Juan Gomez to Palo Alto’s Gamble Garden on Tuesday confronted us with great swaths of blooming narcissus, of many cultivars, as well as tulips, grape hyacinths, and snowdrops.
Among the stand-out cactuses at the Stanford cactus and succulent garden these days: the wonderfully named Cephalocereus senilis (very roughly, ‘old man candle-head’). One of a large set of stand-up, erect cactuses that pretty much inevitably count as phallic symbols — in this case, with the added attraction of lots of wispy white hair. A codgerie of shaggy men:
Not only both about language, but both about portmanteaus. A Drew Dernavich with the verb podlisten formed on analogy with the portmanteau verb podcast; and an Alice Cheng with the POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) Brownstonehenge (brownstone + Stongehenge):
(#1)
“I feel like everybody’s podcasting and nobody’s podlistening.”
(#2)
Today’s Steam Room Stories is about “straight guys giving gay gifts”: what does a straight guy give as a Valentine’s Day gift to his best buddy, who happens to be gay? Two straight guys with this question talk together about it in the steam room, each explaining to the other what he proposes to say to his gay bro. You can watch the video here.
Two cartoons about/with portmanteaus: a One Big Happy and a Zippy:
(#1)
(#2)
smad about having to dwipe. In #1, Ruthie invents portmanteaus to suit her condition: sad + mad, dust + wipe.
The Zippy is more complex. First, the Sharknado films (with the portmanteau sharknado = shark + tornado) are old stuff on this blog, though I don’t recall having seen the shark-headed surfer image (a hybrid being to accompany the portmanteau) before. But the title duditude = dude + attitude was new to me — though the word has a fair presence on the net.
The focus of the strip, however, isn’t on portmanteaus, but on shifts in slang fashions (in white middle-class American speakers, I’d guess): on the claimed spread of awesome (at the expense of great) and the claimed decline of cool. Google Ngram shows no such changes in books (though great has been declining overall for some time), but of course the claim is about informal speech and writing. I haven’t checked the relevant COCA material, but my subjective impression — and it is only that — is that the first claim is broadly accurate while the second is dubious. (On the other hand, the second claim might be broadly accurate for young speakers.)
