Reported by Mark Mandel on ADS-L yesterday, ace for asexual ‘person who feels no sexual attraction to others’ (independent of feeling romantic interest) — a clipping of the base word, making the term roughly comparable in form to the clippings bi for bisexual, homo for homosexual, and hetero for heterosexual (though these items are not fully comparable in tone or style). Ace stands out because, unlike the others, it’s not a prefix on its own, but rather a prefix (a-) plus the following consonant.
Archive for the ‘Clipping’ Category
Sexual clippings
December 9, 2012Lesbo brides
November 3, 2012(Not about language, except for the clipping of lesbian to lesb-, with the affective suffix -o added on.)
Continuing the brides collages, here are four collages from another series, Lesbo Brides.
No PMNs seen
November 2, 2012The final lab report on the synovial fluid that was aspirated on October 24th, which came in during the night, was terse:
Gram Stain: No PMNs seen. No organisms seen.
Culture: No growth 5 days. No Anaerobes isolated.
Clearly a case in which no news is good news: no organisms and no anaerobes is a good thing; the lab work was undertaken, after all, in the hope that nothing would be found. Surgery to replace my right hip, now scheduled for the 14th, can go on.
But what are PMNs?
to cath (redux)
October 31, 2012Yesterday on ADS-L, Charlie Doyle reported a tv commercial for catheters beginning “End painful cathing” and noted some 343,000 raw ghits for cathing. I posted back in 2009 on a commercial with to cath in it, in which I treated cath as a clipping of catheterize ‘use a catheter’ (adding that both the full and the clipped version can be used transitively and intransitively). But there’s more to be said.
For short
October 18, 2012From an appointment on October 2nd with an orthopedist, the clipping nec fac /nɛk fæk/ for necrotizing fasciitis (from the doctor). This was a new abbreviation of the disease name for me; I was accustomed to the initialism NF /ɛn ɛf/ (from other doctors). And I wondered about the /fæk/ piece of the clipping, where I would have expected /fæʃ/ or /fæs/, given the full pronunciation of fasciitis, with one or the other of these as the first syllable.
Cosmetic clippings
August 24, 2012An coupon offer today from AAA for a mani-pedi at a San Jose salon. I suppose the clippings mani (for manicure) and pedi (for pedicure, though it’s also attested for pedicab) have been around for quite some time, but this was the first time I’d really appreciated them.
On the portmanteau watch
June 30, 2012A bouquet of portmanteaus (and one libfix) recently noted, from crapvalanche to repuglican.
Portmanteau, then clip, then analogize
May 21, 2012From Victor Steinbok, a link to this piece by Briana Rognlin entitled “Fitspo: The New Health ‘Inspiration’ Is Just Thinspo In Sheep’s Clothing”, which begins:
“Thinspo” content—images and articles “inspiring” readers to persist at disordered eating and dieting for the sake of being thin— has slowly been getting pushed off social media sites and shamed for its damaging effect on women’s body image and mental health. In its wake, a new brand of body-negative, obsession-spurring “inspiration”—called “fitspo”—has begun cropping up on Facebook, Pinterest, and Tumblr. But with the goals of achieving fitness and health, instead of thinness, it’s unclear when fitspo is a great way to stay motivated, or when it’s just thinspo in sheep’s clothing.
There’s a slideshow on the site, and further discussion of women’s body images, but my interest here is the words thinspo and fitspo.
Portmanteau bots
March 7, 2012In the NYT Magazine of 3/4/12, Gaby Dunn’s “They’re Famous! (On the Internet): Two Women Joined by Justin Timberlake”, about Nikki Glaser and Sara Schaefer’s live-audience podcast “You Had to Be There”:
The fans of “You Had to Be There,” whom Glaser and Schaefer affectionately call “ho-bots and bro-bots,” now feel so close to the women that some have journeyed to live tapings at Schaefer’s apartment.
Rhyming portmanteaus, ho-bot for women, bro-bot for men, both based on robot.
Homactu
February 16, 2012Something I stumbled on this morning while searching for something quite different:
That’s Homactu, a portmanteau of homme ‘man’ and actu, a slang clipping of actuel ‘present, current’ (with a suggestion of fashionable modernity). Elsewhere, Homactu advertises itself as devoted to L’univers de l’homme actuel. Ok, with an emphasis on men’s fashion, grooming, hair styles, etc. — with a decidedly gay take on things, including lots of homoerotic photography, like this intense shirt-lifting young man:
Not just homme, but homo as well.
(Two postings, from many, on shirt-lifting: on this blog, here; and on AZBlogX, on the collage “Exposure”, here.)