Provoked by the Merriam-Webster site‘s “Words We’re Watching: ‘Nibling’: An efficient word for your sibling’s kids”: some reflections on the portmanteauing that gives rise to nibling ‘niece or nephew, sibling’s child’; on “having a word for X in language L”; and on neologism and its discontents.
First, the fun. There’s a book for kids, and there’s a t-shirt for kids, too.
In response to my “DONUT BURGER” posting yesterday, Kyle Wohlmut wrote on Facebook:
Isn’t that “just” a Lutherburger? (with a Wikipedia link)
Well, screw you, Snark Boy; if I’d known about Lutherburgers / Luther Burgers I would have posted about them, so your slagging me for not mentioning them is just gratuitous assholery. I think you need a humongous sticky donut burger stuffed up your raggedy butt.
The Wikipedia article does make it clear that the donut burger has spread much further than I’d realized in my posting — something I’d contemplated there. But I had no idea …
So here’s all the stuff from Wikipedia (where I learned that, whew, Martin Luther had nothing to do with Luther Burgers; who could possibly want a burger designed by a humorless, pleasure-wary, fiercely dedicated Protestant reformer?). We don’t need the pictures, though; no one needs more pictures of, omigod, bacon cheeseburgers crammed between two glazed donuts.
The donut burger is the centerpiece of a photo on Jenny Marinello’s Facebook page on 8/5, from the Ohio State Fair (the booth in the photo also touts Philly fries and butt fries, which will require some explication for many readers). The sign on the booth reassures us that these are real, fresh donuts, and we are in fact looking at shamelessly sweet and sticky glazed donuts here, not some earnest wimpy-hippie fried dough:
The DONUT BURGER, a burger with doughnuts for buns: not, it turns out, just some freakish state fair attraction, but a genuine cultural thing
Now, brief notes: on hybrid food, with and without portmanteau names (the donut burger currently lacks one); and then on six places around the SF BayArea where you can get donut burgers (the glazed donut as bun is standard). So far as I know, they aren’t available in chain burger places, and the fashion for them might pass, but then again they might be a coming thing.
Yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro has Frankenman Victorsson — a man-monster created by cobbling together an ragbag of human bodyparts — somehow fulfilling his destiny by stitching pieces of fabric together to make bed covers:
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
There’s some variety of imitative fallacy here, as if the fact that I was conceived in Niagara Falls should mean I was fated to become a plumber. Or perhaps a garden fountain. Oh wait! I have become the Whizzman of Ramona St.; maybe there’s something to this idea.
(This is very much a not-dead-yet posting. I’m just barely hanging on through still more medical afflictions, but now think the little time I’m able to devote to posting is better spent on upbeat things rather than intimations of mortality.)
Discovered on my desktop, a three-part Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal from 12/19/18. Part 1, the teaser:
(#1)
From my mountainous posting queue, this gem of a risonymic riff:
(#1) Bodysnatch Cummerbund, Buffalo Custardbath, Bumblesnuff Crimpysnatch, Mr. Cabbagewank — four mockings, ridiculous manglings, of the already remarkable name Benedict Cumberbatch; otherwise, the first two paragraphs are an actual news item, accurate in its details, about the 2014 engagement of actor Benedict Cumberbatch to theatre director Sophie Hunter
🐇 🐇 🐇 (the commencement of September) The Calvin and Hobbes comic strip from 9/1/92, reprised in my comics feed on 8/30:
(#1) We can achieve intergenerational incommunicability! Yes we can!
Calvin articulates a view of word use, call it CalWord, which comes in two parts:
Endless lability. Any word can be used to convey any meaning. In the CalWord view, a word is merely substance — pronunciation or spelling — that can be put to any use. So words are the stem cells of the linguistic world. From NOAD:
compound noun stem cell: Biology an undifferentiated cell of a multicellular organism which is capable of giving rise to indefinitely more cells of the same type, and from which certain other kinds of cell arise by differentiation.
Social fencing. Socially distributed variants can serve as social fences, separating the Ins from the Outs and impeding the Outs’ ability to comprehend and communicate with the Ins — impeding, for example, one generation’s ability to comprehend or communicate with the generations after it. The fencing effect is very noticeable for lexical variants — different bits of substance for the same use (soda vs. pop, say); or, especially relevant here, different uses for the same substance (gay ‘lighthearted, carefree’ vs. ‘homosexual’ vs. ‘foolish, stupid, unimpressive’, say).
Zippy’s guide to food-buying in today’s strip: packaging, monosyllabicity (hereafter 1-icity), and collectibility, in that order:
(#1) As ever, thoroughly steeped in pop / mass culture: in the 3rd panel, not just the orange-flavored drink mix Tang, but also the astronaut allusion (“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”); it then turns out that the panel also takes us to orangutans (which are neither orange in color — ok, some reddish tones, but not orange, see #3 below — nor have a tang in their name, but but …)
