Maggie Larson cartoon in the New Yorker‘s 4/8/19 issue:
(#1) (Dried) fruits and nuts meeting and greeting, under the disco ball
A POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau): trail mixer = trail mix + mixer. Combining two elements very much grounded in particular sociocultural worlds (plus that disco ball glittering overhead).
(There will be talk of men’s bodies, among a number of other things, so you might want to exercise some caution.)
Yesterday was National Underwear Day (utilitarian garments elevated to objects of play, desire, and fashion display), today is Hiroshima Day (remembering the horror of an event of mass destruction, death, and suffering). An uncomfortable, even absurd, juxtaposition, but there is a link in the symbolism of the two occasions. In my comics feed for these occasions: four language-related cartoons on familiar language-related themes, none of them having anything to do with either underwear or nuclear holocaust, probably for good reason.
Cartoons first, then the underwear and atomic bombs.
(more…)
This week’s Drunk Cartoon from Bob Eckstein:
driverless car + car chase. At a drawbridge over troubled waters.
Saturday night was Midsummer’s Eve (St. John’s Eve), yesterday Midsummer Day (St. John’s Day) — so that last night was Midsummer Night, when the fairies frolic. (As they did indeed, at SF Pride events.) Meanwhile there are cartoons: a Bill Whitehead Free Range cartoon from 9/6/17, in the July 2018 issue of Funny Times; a John Atkinson Wrong Hands cartoon that came to me from Eleanor Houck; and a Scott and Borgman Zits cartoon in today’s King Features feed.
First come the cartoons, then come the holidays. (Apologies to Brecht and his Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral — pleasure first, then the serious stuff.)
Today’s Rhymes With Orange, with a fine POP (of a nonstandard variety):
(#1) M.C. Hammer-Escher = MC Hammer + M.C. Escher
An M.C. Escher-style tessellation of images of the rapper MC Hammer — visually combining the elements that are combined linguistically in the portmanteau.
In the April 16th New Yorker, this Lars Kenseth cartoon on the POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) museum loan shark:
(#1) museum loan + loan shark
Today’s Bizarro/Wayno collaboration:
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
The Psychiatrist meme, with a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau), all in letter names: E I E I O (conventionalized onomatopoeia from the nursery song “Old MacDonald Had a Farm”) + the initialism O.C.D. (obsessive-compulsive disorder) — with Old MacDonald unable to resist the compulsion to catalog farm animals and the noises they (conventionally) make.
A Bizarro/Wayno (the POP), a Rhymes With Orange (the Caveman meme plus relations between the sexes), and a One Big Happy (the recursion):
On February 24th, in the posting “Computer annals: Reyes Korzybski and the avalanche of spam”, I confronted thousands of spam comments a day from a single site, which used some huge database of names to concoct senders’ names on the spam. That posting was about the name Reyes Korzybski.
The avalanche of comments spam vanished not long after this, so for a period the flow of comments spam dropped to its customary hundreds a day. But then a few days ago a fresh spate began, bringing me (among thousands of others) the name Zane Grills.
Which suggested Zane Grey and grills of various kinds and led me to playful POPs (phrasal overlap portmanteaus) of a specialized sort: name chains (posting here). So I descended to the silliness of the Grey brothers: Billy Zane Grey, Billy Joel Grey, and Fletcher Christian Grey.
My 8/4/17 posting “WaynoPOPs” had a set of POPs (phrasal overlap portmanteaus) from Waynovision cartoons, with a passing a reference by Wayno to the POP Forbidden Froot Loops. Now today, a Bizarro/Wayno collaboration realizing the portmanteau visually:
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
