Today’s One Big Happy:
If you don’t know the snowclonelet template X mix for dog hybrids (poodle mix, shepherd mix, etc.) and don’t know that Lab can be a clipping of Labrador Retriever, then you’re thrown back on things you do know and have to treat lab mix as a compound meaning something like ‘something mixed up, created, in a lab’. Cue Frankenstein.
In the NYT on the 10th, an op-ed piece by Jason Mark, “Climate Fiction Fantasy: What ‘Interstellar’ and ‘Snowpiercer’ Got Wrong”, with the observation that
end-of-the-world scenarios appear so regularly in books and films that they are now their own mini-genre — cli-fi.
Note the playful abbreviation cli-fi ‘climate fiction’ (parallel to the much older sci-fi ‘science fiction’), which was new to me but has apparently been around since 2008 or so.
(More recently, fiction has been abbreviated as fic rather than fi, in fan-fic and slash-fic: fic is the straightforward clipping, and there’s no rhyming motivation for fi, as there is in sci-fi and cli-fi.)
Today’s One Big Happy:
permanent record, with the most common, literal sense of permanent — well, most common for adult users, but things are likely to be different for kids like Ruthie.
From Kristin Bergen on Facebook:
a wonderful eggcorn from a FB teaching discussion group: a colleague reports a senior seminar paper in which the student describes something happening “right from the gecko”
A delightful error (evoking an entertaining image), and surely a type of classical malapropism (CM) — a type I’ll label a Ruthie (after the character of that name in the comic strip One Big Happy) — but not an instance of the subtype of CM known in the error literature as an eggcorn, though to be fair to Kristin it’s significantly similar to eggcorns.
Caught recently in a NYT Magazine story on medical diagnosis (a regular series in the magazine) in which one of the potential diagnoses was Bell’s palsy (the patient turned out to be suffering from Lyme disease). Ah, I have personal history with Bell’s (as it’s sometimes referred to, in truncated form).
My most recent posting had a cartoon pun on abdominal (muscles), muscles that have been featured prominently in huge numbers of my postings on shirtless men, under the name abs, for abdominals. The muscles come in sets, hence the plural; and then the base noun abdominal has been clipped to ab. There are plenty more of these clippings, most of them involving muscles that come in pairs.
So from a 8/19/14 posting “Abs of the week”:
It’s been a while since I posted images of shirtless men with astounding abs (and pecs, delts, traps, and biceps, but oh, those abs!) …
And there’s more on fitness sites, for example, from msn health and fitness, on Wall Ball exercises:
MUSCLES INVOLVED: Quads, Glutes, Abs, Traps, Pecs, Delts, Triceps, Total Body
EQUIPMENT: Medicine Ball
It starts with today’s Doonesbury —
(#1)
and ends with shirtless lycanthrophy. In between: Roland Hedley, III, the apps Tinder and Grindr (with some shirtlessness), geosocial networking (aka geosocial), and professional lycanthrope Tyler Posey (appearing shirtless). A long strange trip.
Today’s Rhymes With Orange:
Nouning by truncation, with the nominal Adj + food abbreviated to Adj, but still functioning as a nominal: Mexican ‘Mexican food’.
A comment (of 8/23) by Andy Sleeper on my haloumi posting:
At a hotel in Chicago recently, at the breakfast buffet, they were serving some dish with egg, meat, and cheese, with a little sign saying “Scrambled with chorizo sausage and chihuahua.” [Note that chorizo would have done fine here; chorizo is the name of a type of pork sausage, so that chorizo sausage is an expansion of chorizo — similar to Brie cheese versus Brie.]
Adjectives with assumed nouns are asking for trouble, it seems to me. From scrambled, I understand eggs, though it could have been brains.
After I inquired, I learned that “chihuahua” refers to a type of cheese I had never heard of. I think “cheese” would have been an important word to include.
First, a note on Chihuahua cheese, then on the “conversion by truncation” in scrambled for scrambled eggs and chihuahua for Chihuahua cheese.