Archive for the ‘Phrasal overlap portmanteaus’ Category

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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).

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Posted in Art, Music, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus | 1 Comment »

POP POP

March 19, 2023

Phrasal 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)

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Posted in Abbreviation, Beheading, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »

The wildebeest caper

February 1, 2023

🐇 🐇 🐇 trois lapins to inaugurate the month of February. But wait! Are those the hoofbeats of … wildebeests? Stand clear! Make way for gnus!

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Posted in Language and animals, Language and food, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Portmanteaus, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Eggs Benedict Arnold

December 29, 2022

Suppose you’re a cartoonist, and this POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) has, well, popped into your head:

eggs Benedict Arnold = eggs Benedict  (breakfast dish of sliced ham on English muffin with hollandaise sauce) + Benedict Arnold (American general who defected to the British during the Revolutionary War)

Can you work this (entertainingly) surprising juxtaposition of elements into a cartoon?

Today, Mike Peters (of Mother Goose and Grimm) took up the challenge:


(#1) The solution is a play on traitor: an egg dish named for a traitor, sold at a place named Traitor Joe’s — with a trader / traitor pun alluding to the grocery chain Trader Joe’s (a perfect pun for most Americans, for whom trader and traitor are homophones; a clever imperfect pun for everyone else

Sweet. Meanwhile, others have labored to devise variants of eggs Benedict that are somehow associable with Benedict Arnold.

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Posted in Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Puns | 1 Comment »

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.

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Posted in Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Names, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Spelling, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »

The loboe and the velveteenager

July 14, 2022

Two 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:

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Posted in Books, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »

Now serving at the Raven Cafe

May 11, 2022

Today’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.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, Language and food, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Parodies, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Poetry, Puns, Semantics of compounds | Leave a Comment »

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.

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Posted in Clothing, Compounds, Expressive language, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, My life, Phonetics, Phonology, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Puns, Semantics of compounds, Underwear, Variation | 1 Comment »

The portmanteau truck

January 31, 2022

🐯🐅🐯(tiger – tiger – tiger, rather than rabbit- rabbit – rabbit) anticipating by a bit the new month tomorrow (February, holding the promise that — in the Northern Hemisphere — winter will in fact come to an end) and also the (lunar) new year, the Year of the Tiger

Meanwhile, this morning’s e-mail brings me a Wayno/Piraro Bizarro with the excellent POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) portmanteau truck = portmanteau + tow truck, the truck in question being a brunch (breakfast + lunch) truck where you can get Tofurkey (tofu + turkey) with Dijonnaise (Dijon + mayonnaise) dressing and a cronut (croissant + doughnut), which you can eat with a spork (spoon + fork).

At the same time, a Daily Jocks ad that’s at once charming and raunchy, featuring a model wearing a garment I would call a moosinglet, a moose singlet, that is, a wrestling singlet in which the model is displaying a moose-knuckle, a penis (especially an erect one) that is visible though the wearer’s clothing.

And then portmanteau truck will lead us to portmanteau jam as a name for a POP chain.

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Phallicity, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Portmanteaus, Underwear | 2 Comments »

Eating like a Pygmalion

December 28, 2021

… Wayno’s portmanteauing title for yesterday’s (12/27) Wayno/Piraro Bizarro:


(#1) A play on Shaw / slaw (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)

Three things: one, plays on the Shaw of George Bernard Shaw (plenty of room for silliness here); two, on the wonders of (cole) slaw; and three, a note on the exclamation by George (which of course has nothing to do with GBS, but also nothing to with kings of Great Britain, since George I (from Hanover) didn’t ascent to the throne until 1714, while exclamations calling on a George go back at least to 1616).

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Posted in Euphemism, Language and food, Language play, Movies and tv, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Puns | 1 Comment »

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