The latest dance rage. From Wikipedia:
Twerking is a “dance move that involves a person shaking their upper hips and lower hips in an up and down bouncing motion, causing them to shake, ‘wobble’ and ‘jiggle.'” To “twerk” means to “dance in a sexually suggestive fashion by twisting the hips”.
From Larry Horn (through some intermediaries), two cartoons by the great gag cartoonist Leo Cullum on the theme of English morphology:
I was moved yesterday to wonder about the whoopee cushion, its history, and the various names for it. In particular, I mused that there would be no good way to predict what the thing is called in English, given a description of it; fart cushion would be the obvious candidate.
Today’s Zippy:
So the strip is “about” hair(s), but it’s also “about” How ’bout them Cubbies?
(On a personal hair and holiday note: I’m watching Hairspray for Mothers Day.)
My iTunes woke me this morning with “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye” (from Firesign Theatre’s How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All (1969)). It’s packed full of playfulness, silliness, and absurdity, much of it linguistic.
A portmant is a clipped portmanteau. There aren’t all that many of them, but here’s one that came to my attention today. It starts with the portmanteau zoobiquity, a somewhat over-clever (and opaque, but certainly memorable) combination of zoo + ubiquity. And goes on to zoob.
Today’s Bizarro plays on the association between penguins and tuxedos — with penguins in t-shirts and open-necked shirts instead of tuxedos:
(#1)
There are other cartoons about penguins and tuxedos (and other cartoons about Casual Fridays, though I won’t look at them here); in fact, there are vast numbers of cartoons about penguins, which are easily anthropomorphized (they walk, or waddle, on two legs, and have arm-like, flipper-like wings) and are fascinatingly anomalous creatures (flightless birds that feed underwater and live in extreme climates and terrain). They are also gregarious and gather in large numbers, leading to cartoons about the difficulty of telling one penguin from another.
Now some words about actual penguins, and how some of them can easily be seen as wearing tuxedos, leading to altered photos of penguins *in* tuxedos and penguins as the emblems of tuexo rental stores; about tuxedos; and about Casual Fridays. Then a selection of penguin cartoons that haven’t already appeared on this blog.
In my e-mail a little while ago, a Princeton University Store ad offering Princeton pinnies — one illustrated here:
The weather is finally starting to warm up and we have the perfect lightweight summer staple for Tigers everywhere – the Princeton pinnie! With a nice loose fit and 2-ply mesh these are sure to keep you cool in all senses of the word! Did we mention, they’re all REVERSIBLE and available in several different styles?!
The term pinnie for such a garment was new to me. But it’s been around for a while, though primarily in British usage.
From an article in Details magazine for April 2013, p. 64, a quote given here without context:
“The house doesn’t even have a complete back. We had to be careful about the budget and determined that we could add the top of the roof in post.”
Add … in post is baffling without the context. Things get a bit clearer when I tell you that the house in question is the ominous Victorian house next to the motel on the set of the new A&E tv series Bates Motel (a prequel to the movie Psycho), and the speaker is Mark Freeborn, the production designer for the series. But that gets you only part of the way; you also have to work out that post is a clipping of post-production in the jargon of filmmaking and video production. And of course you need to know what post-production refers to as a technical term in this world.