E-mail today from Gadi Niram:
I seem to recall you coining the term “risonym”. What I can’t remember was whether a risonym made a person laugh because of its meaning or because of the speaker’s perception of the sound as funny. Can you refresh my memory?
I had no recollection of such a coining (though Gadi eventually resurrected a single use by me on Usenet 20 years ago — see below), but I tried to respond to the idea of words that are funny because of their sound.
Today’s Zippy:
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From NOAD:
noun dodecahedron: a three-dimensional shape having twelve plane faces, in particular a regular solid figure with twelve equal pentagonal faces.
Somewhere in the first Presidential “debate”, or its immediate surrounding net discussion, the phrase goon squad appeared and seized my attention, so that I repeated it like a mantra. I was in the grip of onomatomania
Logo of the League of Legends South African esports team Goon Squad
Today’s Zippy is set in the Ghent neighborhood of Norfolk VA of a few years back, in a Do-Nut Dinette — whose name throws Zippy into a fit of onomatomania (aka repetitive phrase disorder) compounded with Spooner’s affliction (compulsive exchange of word elements in phrases):
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(Separately, there’s the use of dinette to refer to a diner, as a type of restaurant.)
Adrienne Shapiro and her husband Kit Transue (my stepson) festooned in lights in a wonderful tribute to the season (today being the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, a day to shine light against the dark):
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And here I get to explain that today, December 21st, is Festoonus Eve, aka PeneFestoonus (‘almost Festoonus’, with the prefix pen(e)- ‘almost’ of peninsula, penumbra, penultimate, and penecontemporaneous) or the Day Before Festoonus.
Two recent items about men trying to look attractive (to other men): on the Kitsch Bitsch Facebook page today, 1950s physique model Mel Fortune festooned for Christmas (the image is entertaining but just barely not X-rated, so if such images trouble you, leave this posting); and a William Haefeli cartoon from the latest (12/17/18) New Yorker, featuring a pair of his upscale urban gay men negotiating a date / trick.
Tuesday’s Zippy:
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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.
On the oak-leaved hydrangeas, Hydrangea quercifolia, which have burst into bloom all over my neighborhood: big shrubs with big oak-like leaves (the oaks providing the querc– in my title’s quercy) and creamy white flowers in big panicles (the panic of my title and of panic grass). With a note on H. quercifolia‘s close relative, H. paniculata. A digression on South American creatures irrelevantly named querque /’kerke/ in Spanish. Then, inevitably, on panicles and panic grasses (genus Panicum). Don’t panic.
(#1) H. quercifolia in a woodland setting
The Zippy from the 30th, with the Dingburg School of beatnik typewriter poets:
They compose on their typewriters, creating poetic texts that are (to the untrained eye) just strings of characters. Their names are absurd combinations of words Bill Griffith finds attractive or risible: Feldspar Hatband, Mulch Onionskin. (I am especially fond of feldspar myself, have been for years.)
Two pieces of news, from wildly disparate parts of my life, but both with Mormon connections.
First, a gay porn sale from the Lucas studios, from their MormonBoyz.com specialty site: tons of deeply transgressive LDS mansex, framed as daddy-son sex to boot; also with lots of images of men kissing, which I happen to find very satisfying.
Second, the news from Salt Lake City, where the 92nd annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America is drawing to a close today — an event that brings with it meetings of sister societies, among them the American Dialect Society, sponsor of an annual Word of the Year competition, a kind of public lexicographic circus with voting from the floor. The overall WOTY winner this year, announced on the 5th: fake news, in two different senses. Details on this and the other winners below.
