Paul Noth in the March 5th New Yorker:
(#1)
A POP (phrasal overlap portanteau): home birth + Birth of Venus, with the two expressions combined linguistically, and also conceptually in Noth’s drawing.
Archive for the ‘Phrasal overlap portmanteaus’ Category
POP on the half shell
February 28, 2018The Fountain of Angels in America
August 30, 2017(A return to Angels in America, after experiencing the NTE performance of Part Two: Perestroika last Sunday (the 27th); I posted about the NTE revival overall and about Part One: Millennium Approaches on this blog on the 21st. There will also be a return to the show Guys and Dolls, which I posted about here on the 24th. And a return to the theme of urban jungles, “wild” spaces in the city, especially the Ramble in NYC’s Central Park (one of many such spaces that serve as locales for gay cruising and tricking), which I posted about here on the 19th. I remind you that the subtitle of Angels is A Gay Fantasia on National Themes; yes, it’s about religion, politics, race, transcendance, America as the New World / new life, moral universes, New York City, love, death, and transfiguration, and all that, but it’s centrally about homosexuality, gay sex and gay love, and AIDS. It’s a breath-taking spectacle and, remarkably, much of it is truly funny — a damn good thing, because if it weren’t both spectacular and funny, how could you bear those themes, especially for over 6 hours?)
The fountain in Angels in America is the Bethesda Fountain in NYC’s Central Park (with its crowning sculpture, the Angel of the Waters), named after the Bethesda fountain in the New Testament, a place of healing.
Solid Chet and lean Bo
August 28, 2017Underwear ads again (from today’s Daily Jocks sale), with captions from me. Men’s bodies, mansex allusions, not for everyone.
(#1) Sweat with me, baby
Solid Chet the gym jock
Sweats hard
Lick the salt he’ll
Towel you off
(#2) Lowriders on the storm
Lean Bo the surf jock
Goes low pull him
Lower use your
Teeth those trunks are
Made for cruising
Sweaty Chet and lowball Bo.
Make America grate again
August 18, 2017Protests against pre-shredded cheese in today’s Bizarro:
(#1)
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
A punning play on the political slogan Make America Great Again.
Note red baseball caps on several of the protesters.
WaynoPOPs
August 4, 2017In my e-mail, a nice note from cartoonist Wayno about a type of wordplay that he likes to indulge in, exemplified by this Waynovision cartoon:
(#1)
The title is a portmanteau combination of two overlapping phrases, Checkpoint Charlie and Charlie Parker. And the content of the cartoon involves combining Checkpoint Charlie the place in Berlin and Charlie Parker the jazz saxophonist.
Back in 2011, Wayno mused on his blog about such word play, suggesting the name streptonym for it. On this blog, I’ve used the descriptive label phrasal overlap portmanteau (POP, for short) for such expressions as denoting a hybrid of the referents of the two contributing expressions. So #1 is a Wayno POP.
POP with Poe
July 18, 2017Another POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) from Hilary Price in today’s Rhymes With Orange:
(#1) Edgar Allan Poe + po’ boy
The Raven flies to New Orleans.
POP go the pheromones
July 4, 2017Two recent cartoons in my feed that play with language: a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) in Rhymes With Orange, an outrageous pun in Bizarro (a replay from 2009, first posted here on 2/15/14).
Friday word play in the comics
April 28, 2017Two cartoons to end the week: a Rhymes With Orange with a four-word play and a Bizarro with a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau):
(#1)
The Cantonese American dish moo goo gai pan ‘chicken with button mushrooms and sliced vegetables’, with a pun on each word: onomatopoetic moo, onomatopoetic goo, the informal noun guy, the Greek god Pan.
(#2)
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
Doctors Without Borders + Border Collie(s).
(Note that there are a lot of things you need to know to appreciate these comics.)
Two from the 2/27 NYer
February 22, 2017Not only both about language, but both about portmanteaus. A Drew Dernavich with the verb podlisten formed on analogy with the portmanteau verb podcast; and an Alice Cheng with the POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) Brownstonehenge (brownstone + Stongehenge):
(#1)
“I feel like everybody’s podcasting and nobody’s podlistening.”
(#2)
