(#1) Xmas card from Tiny Bee Cards, offered on Amazon
Lizard warnings, lizzard warnings, lizards falling from the trees.
Archive for the ‘Portmanteaus’ Category
Lizardry
December 24, 2022The penguin Christmas card
December 11, 2022In the mail, from Mary Ballard, this penguin Christmas card (from Fantus Paper Products), featuring the conventional schematic cute penguin, which can be seen in many variants all over the place, not just at holiday time:
(#1) I get a penguin, because the penguin is one of my totem animals; but penguins, stereotypically from cold and snowy lands, are in general associated with holiday time in the Northern Hemisphere, so penguin Christmas cards are something of a thing
Outrageous POP
September 30, 2022🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate September; tomorrow the inaugural rabbits of October will bound in
In today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, set in the Schmancy auction house — think Christie’s or Sotheby’s — a Mötley Crüe cruet POPped (phrasal overlap portmanteaued) to Motley Crüet (somehow the first röck döt got lost in the compression process):
(#1) Wayno’s title: “Tinny Aftertaste”, combining the metal of heavy metal with the taste of a cruet’s contents (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
To understand this, you need to know about fancy-schmancy auction houses and how they operate; about cruets and their function in dining; and about heavy metal music and the heavy metal band Mötley Crüe and their reputation for vulgarly outrageous behavior, which clashes with the civility of oil-and-vinegar dressings for salads, so yielding the humor of anomalous juxtaposition.
The Monster and the Minotaureador
September 21, 2022Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, with an instance of one of the house specialties — the Psychiatrist cartoon meme — rich in mythic resonances, and incorporating a bovine Nietzschean pun:
Not just any old ruminant on the couch, but the chimeric monster the Minotaur, reflecting guiltily on, oh, the young people sacrificed to him in the Labyrinth, and now confronted with a Theseus figure, in the form of his therapist (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)
Wayno’s title, another pun, but a perfect one this time: “Bull Session”.
Three peanuts meet in a bar
August 18, 2022Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, requiring a boatload of popcultural knowledge to understand:
(#1) The easy part: these are three anthropomorphic peanuts, M, M, F from left to right, and they are sitting at a bar, with drinks in front of them (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
Somehow the meeting of these three exemplifies the N1 + N2 compound N wingnut / wing-nut / wing nut (which has 4 senses in NOAD, plus a bunch more you can imagine). But how?
Many a pickle packs a pucker
July 29, 2022O pickle, my love / What a beautiful pickle you are!
Blame it on Nancy Friedman (@Fritinancy on Twitter), who took us down to the pickle plant in Santa Barbara on 7/18, citing these 5 delights, with their label descriptions:
Unbeetables (pickled beets with unbeatable heat) – pun on unbeatable
Carriots of Fire (pickled carrots to light your torch) – punning allusion to the film Chariots of Fire
¡Ay Cukarambas! (dill-icious spicy dill pickle spears) – complex portmanteau of the American Spanish exclamation ¡ay caramba! and the noun cuke ‘cucumber’
Asparagusto (pickled asparagus with a kick) – portmanteau of asparagus and gusto
Bread & Buddhas (semi-sweet bread & butter pickles) – pun on bread and butter (pickles)
(#1)
Pickles are automatically phallicity territory, and the Pacific Pickle Works in Santa Barbara CA (website here) doesn’t shy away from their penis potential, augmenting it by references to phallic carrots, asparagus spears, and unpickled cucumbers. If you have the eye for it, we all live in Penis Town.
The loboe and the velveteenager
July 14, 2022Two Wayno / Piraro Bizarro POPs (phrasal overlap portmanteaus) that have been accumulating on my desktop: the lobo oboe from 4/22, the velveteen teenager from 7/11:
Now serving at the Raven Cafe
May 11, 2022Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm, with the POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) Edgar Allan Po’ Boy = Edgar Allan Poe (the American writer and poet) + po’ boy (the superb New Orleans submarine sandwich):
(#1) Edgar Allan Po’ Boy is a N1 + N2 compound N, understood as having the head, N2, semantically associated with the modifier, N1, by (the referent of) N2’s being named after (the referent of) N1 — parallel to the Woody Allen Sandwich (a tower of corned beef and pastrami) at NYC’s Carnegie Deli
(Plus the allusion to Poe’s poem The Raven — Quoth the raven, “Nevermore” — in Grimm’s, “I had it once, but… nevermore”.)
If you were a betting person, you would surely put some money on this MGG strip as not being the first to use this particular POP — of course, that would be fine, it’s all in how you develop the joke — and you would win.
Just on this blog, in Zippy postings from 2016 and a Rhymes With Orange posting in 2017.
Plus bonuses: a texty with a pun turning on the ambiguity of /póbòj/ as either po’ boy or Poe boy; and two cartoons turning on Edgar Allan Poe / Po’ Boy understood as a Source or Ingredient compound (parallel to shrimp po’ boy) — yes, Edgar Allan Poe in a po’ boy, in it, good enough to eat.
The sequel to my allergic ass
May 1, 2022🐇 🐇 🐇 pour le premier mai. A follow-up to yesterday’s posting “My allergic ass”, which was (mostly) about pronominal ass — possessive pronoun + ass, used of a person, to refer not to their buttocks but to that person: his ass ‘he, him’, your ass ‘you’, my ass ‘I, me’.
[Ambiguity may ensue: my ass is warm can mean either ‘my buttocks are warm’ or ‘I am warm’ (you have to figure out from context which was intended); while my ass is heart-shaped is probably about my buttocks (well, I might be Candy Man, shaped like a candy heart), and my ass is allergic is probably about me (though I might conceivably have buttocks afflicted by contact dermatitis).]
Now: through Facebook discussions, two different threads have emerged from that posting: one about material in a long citation in the 2006 Beavers and Koontz-Garboden paper on pronominal ass; the other about the source of the example — my allergic ass — that provoked my posting.
The Tides of March
March 15, 2022For the 15th of March, Tim Evanson created this image (reproduced here with his permission):
(#1) Tim used a picture from a “Kittendales” calendar; a free clipart calendar page of March; and pictures of Tide products from the Target web site
