Two recent Wayno/Piraro Bizarro strips, from the 15th and (for St. Patrick’s Day) the 17th, both of linguistic interest: among other things, the portmanteau arthropodcast in the first; and the front-clipping ‘shmallows (for marshmallows, of the psychedelic sort) in the second:
Archive for the ‘Clipping’ Category
A jointed-limb portmanteau and a sugary front-clipping
March 18, 2021Another BYOB
November 3, 2019Today’s Bizarro, with yet another unpacking of the initialism BYOB:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 12 in this strip! — see this Page.)
In the conventional initialism, BYOB stands for ‘bring your own bottle / booze / beer / beverage’, but here it’s ‘bring your OB’, where OB /o bi/ is short for — a clipping of — OB-GYN /o bi ǰi waj ɛn/. From NOAD:
noun ob-gyn: abbreviation [pronounced as an initialism] obstetrics and gynecology.
Come lay your carnal weapons by
August 31, 2019… an arresting line from the Sacred Harp (1991 Denson revision), #404, Youth Will Soon Be Gone, suggesting perhaps:
OUR CARNAL WEAPONS
(#1)
adj. carnal: relating to physical, especially sexual, needs and activities: carnal desire. (NOAD)
But in SH404 it comes from St. Paul, in 2 Corinthians 10:3-4 (KJV):
For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh … For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal
And it all depends on what the compilers of the King James Version meant by carnal, which is evidently not what comes first to modern minds.
A bit more reaping
June 29, 2019Just one day after a particularly fine Rhymes With Orange cartoon combining the Desert Island cartoon meme and the Grim Reaper meme — in my 6/27 posting “The Desert Island Reaper” — came a Wayno/Piraro Bizarro with a groaner Grim Reaper pun:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
The figure of the Grim Reaper — the bringer of death — as a window-washer, removing — destroying — the grime on the windows of a high-rise building, with the blade of his scythe replaced by a window-washer’s squeegee.
For gay penguins, science and Canada!
February 21, 2019A few days ago, this full-page magazine display made the rounds of Facebook:
(#1) Deriding the “Libtard Agenda” while imitating the Johnson Smith Co.’s ads for novelty items in the back pages of comic books and other publications aimed at children
The first copies I saw didn’t identify the creator or the publication the page came from, and there was some question whether it was (as George V. Reilly, invoking Poe’s Law, put it) “a right-wing parody of progressive views, or a left-wing parody of right-wing opinions of progressive views”. Parody, certainly, but from what viewpoint?
So in its form it’s a parody of a genre of advertising hucksterism. And then in its specific content it’s a parody of a style of political talk (either mocking what’s framed as a preoccuption with kale, gun control, facts, and the like, or mocking those who engage in such mockery).
Much has now become clear. To start with, the copy of the page in #1 identifies the creator as Mary Trainor, and that provides enough context to eventually sort things out.
Three Pearls
February 6, 2019… Before Swine(s), with language play. From 10/6/18, exploiting the ambiguity of /flu/ as flew or flu ‘influenza’; and two testicular cartoons, from 11/1/18 (nut sack) and (yesterday) 2/5/19 (go nads).
Wok it to the golden Lab for analysis, har-de-har-har
December 3, 20183 x 3: three cartoons of linguistic interest for the 3rd of December: a Dave Blazek Loose Parts with merged phonemes; a Wayno/Piraro Bizarro with an ambiguity; and a Zits with an onomatopoeia.
A grotesque word
November 29, 2018Tuesday’s Zippy:
(#1)
Another chapter in word attraction: Zippy’s (and Griffy’s) enjoyment of “funny words”. Here, gargoyle, which Zippy, absurdly, analyzes as a compound of the nouns gar (referring to a kind of sharp-toothed fish) and goyle (a rare, mostly dialectal, term for a deep trench) — so, roughly ‘fish ravine’. Turns out the actual etymology of gargoyle is entertaining enough on its own.
toro katsu and more
September 12, 2018Another birthday report, from the 6th: a sushi lunch at Kanpai (Lytton Ave. in downtown Palo Alto), a gift from Kim Darnell — with mostly standard items, but featuring toro katsu (and there lies a tale of borrowing words from one language to another). Photo of a man, bowl of miso soup in hand, seriously contemplating Japanese food, wanting a photo of the meal, and really not wanting a photo of himself:
(#1) The author with a Kanpai lunch special
Your left to right: bowl of miso soup, salad of fresh baby greens with Japanese dressing, toro katsu (with tonkatsu sauce, sriracha mayonnaise, and cooked broccoli floret), bowl of rice; then a platter of California roll and sashimi (tuna and salmon), mug of green tea (with images of sushi on it, labeled in Japanese and English), glass of Chardonnay. The side order of eel (unagi) sushi has not yet arrived.
You can call me Al
April 25, 2017Yesterday, a posting on a mini-phal /mIni fæl/, a miniature Phalaenopsis (orchid). Which moved me to investigate names of the form /mIni Cæl/, for various consonants C: existing names and ones you can invent, using a /Cæl/ that’s an existing word (pal, gal), a clipping (phal for Phalaenopsis, Cal for California), a nickname (Cal for Calvin, Sal for Sally, Salvatore, or Salvador), or an acronym (HAL for hook and line, HAL for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer).
What follows is a mere sampling of such cases, not intended to be exhaustive.