From Season Devereux this morning, this excellent image on Threads, from the poster linguisticdiscovery:
Two flying entities, the helicopter and the pterodactyl, are about to hybridize, to merge into a single thing, which will then obviously be denoted by the portmanteau helicopterodactyl — Is it a plane? (not exactly, though it’s a kind of aircraft) Is it a bird? (not exactly, though it has wings) It’s Superfly!
That is, the NASCARGOT races, as a Bizarro of 12/26/10 has it, reveling in the portmanteau of NASCAR and escargot (French ‘snail’) and showing us Dan Piraro’s goofy conception of snails in a NASCAR race:
(#1) The cartoon appeared as the middle panel of a Bizarro Sunday Punnies strip with three bits of word play in it, posted about (without further analysis) in my 12/26/10 posting “Punnies #11” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
Hat tip to Susan Fischer for dredging up this old cartoon on Facebook yesterday. Causing me to reflect on the fact that not all of my readers will be familiar with the American popcultural phenomenon that is NASCAR; there are people who wouldn’t be surprised to see that contestants in a race carry numbers, but would be baffled by all those ads on the snails’ shells. Indeed, DP has managed to transport the physical trappings of NASCAR vehicles to le monde des escargots. Motor sport meets malacology.
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.
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.
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”.)
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 —
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!).
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:
In today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, the punning portmanteau pontiff no return:
pontiff ‘the Pope’ + point of no return ‘point at which turning back is no longer possible’ = pontiff no return ‘the Pope will not return (for some time)’ in a simplified register — foreigner talk, caveman talk, Tonto talk, etc. (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
… Wayno’s title for yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, with its excellent POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) laissez-fairy godmother:
(#1) laissez-faire + fairy godmother yields a hands-off mentor and guide, of not much use to the disgruntled Cinderella, who will now have to do her own prince-finding (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
