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pinnies
In my e-mail a little while ago, a Princeton University Store ad offering Princeton pinnies — one illustrated here: The text: The weather is finally starting to warm up and we have the perfect...
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Penguins and tuxedos
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...
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Brief mention: a portmant
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,...
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Nick Danger: an appreciation
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...
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How ’bout them Cubbies?
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.) 1. Speech acts. Let’s start...
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whoopee cushion
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...
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Cullum on morphology
From Larry Horn (through some intermediaries), two cartoons by the great gag cartoonist Leo Cullum on the theme of English morphology: (#1) That’s retox, on the model of detox (a clipping of...
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twerking
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...
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Wednesday puns
Two of today’s cartoons: a Dilbert and a Pearls Before Swine, both with elaborate puns: (#1) This turns on the verb weasel, plus the legal phrase (beyond a) reasonable doubt (plus the derivation of...
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slashclip
My recent postings on slash fiction and imagery, and fan fiction and art, pulled up a series of truncations and clippings, the most notable being manip, a count noun referring to a digital or photo...
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amaze
It starts with tlhe clipping amaze for amazing and then goes on to the playful extension amazeballs (or amaze balls). Then both of these can be modified by the slang clipping totes (for totally). And...
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hash
An recent exchange on Facebook (about Gertrude Stein) led to musings on the drug noun hash, which at least historically is a shortening of hashish. One participant noted that these days you don’t see a...
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Slang change
Yesterday Mark Liberman posted on this Doonesbury cartoon: Rich in material. The main thing I want to note (as Mark did) is a sense development in the slang verb rock, from an older sense, around at...
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Minimumble
From Benjamin Slade, pointers to Chris Hallbeck’s webcomic site Minimumble, with three recent language-related cartoons: From 2/12/14, treating procrastinator as pro + castinator, with pro treated as a...
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POP goes the taxi
Yesterday’s Rhymes With Orange: A POP — phrasal overlap portmanteau — combining the clipped compound mani-pedi (a manicure plus a pedicure; see here) and the compound pedicab ‘pedal-operated taxi’.
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Clipped musculature
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...
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doxxing
A slang term (also spelled doxing) from the Gamergate controversy (see below), for “researching and publishing personally identifiable information about an individual” (Wikipedia), in a form of...
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Word errors
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...
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Permanent
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. [NOAD2]...
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For short
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...
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