Two cartoons from the New Yorker issue of 12/15/25: Michael Maslin with a phrasal overlap portmanteau tribute to the state of Vermont (land of covered casseroles, for covered-dish socials, and rustic covered bridges); and Roz Chast, showing us Santa’s alarmed helpers when he can’t resist falling — once again — for clickbait.
Archive for the ‘Phrasal overlap portmanteaus’ Category
A Vermont portmanteau and a net-naive Santa
December 16, 2025Meat shoes
July 19, 2024From 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 —
Free-range folklore
May 5, 2024… 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)
Briefly noted: Oceanic Opus
April 19, 2024… Wayno’s title for today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, which I think of “MobyDicPOP”, to recognize the phrasal overlap portmanteau Moby Dictionary in it:
Moby Dick + dictionary (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
Easy to imagine other DicPOPs: Tricky Dictionary, for Richard Nixon’s pungent vocabulary of contempt and abuse; Private Dictionary, for the lexicon of private eyes; Pencil Dictionary, for a list of famous men with thin penises; and so on.
I suppose it’s merely caviling to note that a Moby Dictionary should be huge, and white.
Cave canem
January 23, 2024The Dave Coverly Speed Bump cartoon of 4/24/18, with a fresh take on dogs to beware of: not vicious guard or attack dogs, but hyperkinetic emotional-support dogs overwhelming passing pedestrians by lavishing empathetic concern on them:
(#1) An especially nice touch is the dog saying — this is cartoonland, where animals talk, in English — that it can smell the hurt, the cluster of emotional states that give off markers that many dogs can in fact smell and interpret
Packing Extreme Meat
December 18, 2023(A lot of this posting is about the title of a Lucas gay porn movie, slated for full release in March 2024, but with its scenes being released one by one before then — the first, baldly titled “Dom King pounds Leonardo Bravo”, out last Friday (12/15), is described in one section of my 12/16 posting “Christmas days at the gay porn factories”. Before going on to an analysis of the movie’s title, I’ll unload some of the Lucas p.r. for the flick, and provide a sweet shot of the young Argentinean bottom LB in its first scene; this stuff is all about men’s sexual parts and man-on-man sex, in crude street language, so it’s entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest. After that, you’ll get some sexual slang, though treated analytically; mostly there will be a lot of technical linguistics, but I’m trusting you to handle this material like adults. Relax, you can do it (as Frankie Goes to Hollywood didn’t quite say).)
Part the First: four guys with big dicks. The Lucas Entertainment press release for the whole film, in gayporntalk:
Release Date: Mar 01, 2024
Performers [alphabetically ordered by first name]: Austin Ponce, Craig Marks, Dom King, Jacob Lord, Jeffrey Lloyd, Kosta Viking, Leandro Bravo, Sean Xavier
Some guys have such huge dicks that they can barely keep them under control… that’s when you know they’re PACKING EXTREME MEAT! Dom King unleashes his huge cock on Leandro Bravo and pounds him bareback. Kosta Viking and Jacob Lord suck and fuck until they nut. Sean Xavier slams Craig Marks with his enormous piece of man meat. And Jeffrey Lloyd funds Austin Ponce with his fat uncut dick!
[Linguistic note. Most of this is familiar ornamental gayporntalk: pound and slam ‘fuck’, nut ‘ejaculate, come, shoot’. But fund (with) used like award or bestow (with) as yet another way to convey ‘fuck’ (fucking as figuratively giving your dick to another man, bestowing it on him, bestowing him with it) is new to me. Promoted no doubt by the orthographic / phonological similarity between FUND and FUCK.]
From the first-released segment, I give you, not the big-dicked muscle-stud topman DK, contemptuously pounding Argentinean ass, but his lean, hairy, and very hot, novice pussyboy LB (as a receptive / bottom, long retired from active service, I note that I view the label pussyboy as playful and celebratory):
On the beach: Leandro Bravo in basic black
Part the Second: based on a hot-cock POP. This section is about the title Packing Extreme Meat, which is a pun on Packing Extreme Heat, so I turn now to the VP pack extreme heat. Which is an unusual (but attested) type of POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau). Whose contributing phrases are figurative expressions, one conveying ‘having a big penis’, the other ‘being sexually arousing’. And whose shared (overlapping) material — heat — has different senses in the two contributors, so that the portmanteau is also a pun, a punmanteau, if you will.
Yes, it’s complicated. It just has to be unpacked bit by bit. Stay with me.
I’ll start with two general observations about POPs, one about their form (about where the shared material comes in the two contributors — in the middle, at the beginning, or at the end), the other about their interpretation (about whether the shared material has the same meaning or different meanings in the two contributors — in what I’ll call vanilla POPs vs. pun POPs). There will be generous collections of examples from real life; don’t be alarmed by all this abstract description.
— Where does the shared material come? In your everyday POP, the shared material comes in the middle, but the beginning and the end are other possibilities:
medial sharing: A B C = (A B) + (B C) — sweet tooth fairy = sweet tooth + tooth fairy; Chia pet cemetery = Chia pet + pet cemetery; Home Birth of Venus = home birth + Birth of Venus; Billy Zane Grey = Billy Zane + Zane Grey (almost all POPs are of this form)
initial sharing: A (B + C) = A B + A C — paranormoralegal = paranormal + paralegal (a minority option)
final sharing: (A + B) C = A C + B C — L. Ron Mother Hubbard = L. Ron Hubbard + Mother Hubbard (another minority option)
— Is the meaning of the shared material constant or divergent in the two contributors? There are many vanilla POPs, like sweet tooth fairy, Chia pet cemetery, and Home Birth of Venus above. But there are also a ton of pun POPs, along the lines of:
snow border collie = snowboarder + border collie; Edgar Allan po’boy = Edgar Allan Poe + po’boy
similarly: Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young Frankenstein, Fleetwood Macchiato, Half a Key Largo, Pacific Rim job, iPad Thai
Yes, the really memorable pun POPs tend to be pretty outrageous; they figure in elaborate pun jokes.
Now: pack extreme heat. This is a final-sharing pun POP:
pack extreme heat = pack heat + extreme heat, with contributors:
— pack heat, a verb + object idiom (meaning ‘carry a gun’), with the slang noun heat ‘weaponry; weapon, gun, pistol’ as object
— extreme heat ‘high temperature’
On its face, that would yield an expression meaning something like ‘carry a gun that’s hot to the touch’. But then both contributors are understood figuratively, and sexually; remember that we’re working our way up to the title of a vehicle to (in elevated language) aid gay men to achieve ejaculation through masturbating to the filmed performances. It’s a gay jack-off flick, people, so its title pretty much has to be a dirty play on words; that’s why both parts now acquire dirty figurative senses: the gun of pack heat can be taken as a sexual metaphor, for a (big) penis, so that the phrase can convey ‘have a big cock / dick’. Meanwhile, there are also sexual metaphorical uses of heat, referring to sexual receptivity, sexual arousal, or the quality of being sexually arousing. so that extreme heat can convey high sexual involvement (in mind and/or body).
Voilà! Packing Extreme Heat, an excellent title for a gay porn movie: easily understood as satisfyingly down and dirty (even if you don’t understand the linguistic mechanisms that make it work); admirably raunchy, without using any off-color vocabulary at all (unlike, say, the Treasure Island Media gay porn flick Ruin the Cunt — which, like the Lucas film, is largely focused on bareback anal sex between men.)
Hold that thought about admirable raunchiness. I’ll get back to that in a moment.
But first I’ll do my duty as a linguist to fill in some of the lexicographic details on pack heat from standard sources, rather that just spouting glosses off the top of my head. (Extreme heat is, I think, entirely straightforward.) From NOAD:
phrase pack heat: North American informal carry a gun: he was busted at JFK for packing heat.
And from GDoS:
noun heat: 4 (US) weapons, arms [AZ: this is the M[ass] use, which might be better glossed as ‘weaponry’; but the entry also has C[ount] uses, glossed as ‘pistol’]
One last turn of the sexual screw. Ok, in Packing Extreme Heat, the Lucas Entertainment people had a fine title available to them. But they then decided to gild this lily with a paint gun, pushing the big-dick image hard by punning on pack extreme heat with the off-color pun meat ‘penis’ for the more innocent-seeming slang noun heat. Bringing us Packing Extreme Meat, for the holiday jack-off season (and on until March 1st, when the whole work will be officially released).
I know, I know, subtlety is not their strong point.
Two formula comics
December 15, 2023⬅️ 🚘 Nishi Day, 12/15, the day when I traditionally set off driving west from Columbus OH to Palo Alto CA for the winter quarter; and the day before 🎂 🎉 the December Birthfest (celebrating Ludwig Beethoven, born 1770; Jane Austen, born 1775; and my excellent friend Ned Deily, born 1952)
In today’s Comics Kingdom feed, two strips that turn on formulas, but of two very different kinds. First, a Rhymes With Orange that illustrates a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau), a joke form that manages to combines two strikingly unrelated elements whose names happen to overlap — in this case a postmortem medical procedure (called an autopsy) and a confused, disordered state (referred to as topsy-turvy). And then, a Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon, yet another of their forays into the Psychiatrist cartoon meme, set in a psychiatrist’s office and involving a patient on an analytic couch plus a therapist, in an adjacent chair, taking notes on the session; the patient or the therapist or both are astonishing characters, and the setting allows for all manner of jokes to be worked into their encounter — in this case, an everything-bagel patient and a baker therapist, confronting the patient’s anxiety at wanting more (Wayno’s title: “Too Much is Never Enough”).
But now, to the toons!
From the Harry Pottery Barn
October 13, 2023In 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.)
POP Art Rock
April 25, 2023(Today’s quickie not-dead-yet posting.)
The Bizarro from 3/9/21, with a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) that combines art — in the form of the painter Georgia O’Keeffe — with rock music — in the form of Keith Richards from the Rolling Stones:
(#1) Keith Richards rocking away, with a reproduction of an O’Keeffe on the back of his jacket (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
The POP is Georgia O’Keeffe + Keith Richards = Georgia O’Keeffe Richards. The overlapping materials — /kif/ and /kiθ/ — are nor perfect matches, but are very close phonologically, the voiceless fricatives /f/ and /θ/ differing only in point of articulation).
POP POP
March 19, 2023Phrasal Overlap Portmanteau time, starting with one from yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, which is (by accident) regrettably topical; and going on to a more complex one from cartoonist Leigh Rubin’s Rubes strip back in 2016 — complex because Rubin probably was thinking of the joke as a cute pun (I told you it was complex).
But first, yesterday’s Bizarro:
(#1) Drag queen meets legendary lumberjack: the POP RuPaul Bunyan = RuPaul + Paul Bunyan (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
