My “Grocery store semiotics” posting looked briefly at two canned-food preparations: Manwich and Beefaroni. Manwich: “a canned sloppy joe sauce … The can contains seasoned tomato sauce that is added to cooked ground beef in a skillet” to yield a filling for hamburger buns. And Beefaroni: “pasta with beef in tomato sauce”, essentially a ground beef casserole in a can. Both names are portmanteaus, and both are somewhat opaque in their meaning.

Note that the (registered) names are for versions of preparations that can be made from scratch, and were so made long before they were marketed in cans. What the commercial versions supply is ease of preparation, not taste.

1. Manwich. On the sloppy joe:

A sloppy joe is a sandwich originating in the United States of ground beef, onions, tomato sauce or ketchup and other seasonings, served on a hamburger bun. (link)

The sloppy joe is at one end of the masculinity / manliness scale of food (in the sandwich world, it shares that end of the scale with the Dagwood sandwich): it’s meat, it’s messy, and you hold it in your hand to eat it, no utensils needed — man’s food.

[Digression on the other end of the  scale: the cucumber sandwich:

The traditional cucumber sandwich is composed of paper-thin slices of cucumber placed between two thin slices of crustless, lightly buttered white (or wheat in some cases) bread. (link)

This is a sandwich for ladies' teas or for effete men. And it figures in one of the great works of English literature, Oscar Wilde's comic play The Importance of Being Earnest. Early in the play:

Algernon [Moncrieff, to his manservant Lane]. And, speaking of the Science of Life, have you got the cucumber sandwiches cut for Lady Bracknell [and Gwendolyn Fairfax]?

[Algernon, talking to Jack Worthing, thoughtlessly consumes the sandwiches himself, one by one.  Lady B. and Gwendolyn arrive.]

… Lady Bracknell: And now I’ll have a cup of tea, and one of those nice cucumber sandwiches you promised me.

… Algernon (picking up empty plate in horror). Good heavens! Lane! Why are there no cucumber sandwiches? I ordered them specially.

Lane (gravely). There were no cucumbers in the market this morning, sir. I went down twice.

Algernon. No cucumbers!

Lane. No, sir. Not even for ready money.

Yes, this is a total digression from sloppy joe sauce. Though it does have to do with masculinity, and that’s important in the Manwich world.]

Note: the brand name Manwich is a mass noun, but when you use Manwich to make sloppy joes, you have made Manwiches or manwiches; that’s the count noun Manwich / manwich. The product:

  (#1)

Ok, so Manwich is a portmanteau of man and sandwich (with the parts sharing /æn/ in pronunciation, AN in spelling). Crudely, a Manwich (the count noun) is a man sandwich — that is, ‘a sandwich FOR men’ — and Manwich (the mass noun) is a sauce for making Manwiches. Semantically, the brand name is a massification of the sandwich name. (On sandwiches, see this posting.)

Once you have Manwich, other -wich words suggest themselves. A number of these are attested, with various interpretations of -wich. There’s hamwich merely meaning ‘ham sandwich’, or referring to a particular sandwich, a baked ham and cheese sandwich on a dinner roll. And the ChikWich, a breaded chicken breast sandwich on a bun, sold at restaurants of that name. And the shrimpwich, in which other ingredients are sandwiched within a shrimp — in the Sunkist Lemon Shrimpwich with Yogurt-Mustard Dip Recipe (here). And the turkwich, lean turkey with Manwich sauce (and no breadstuff).

2. Beefaroni. Well, you say, no complication here, just beef + macaroni, understood copulatively. Beef and elbow macaroni, with tomato sauce, cooked in a casserole (preferably with cheese on top). And that’s what’s indicated in older photos of the product:

  (#2)

More recent material merely specifies pasta, rather than macaroni specifically:

  (#3)

And the pasta in the photos is related to macaroni (it’s hollow and cut into short pieces), but lacks the curves Americans expect in this pasta. For reference, here’s a pile of elbow macaroni:

  (#4)

On macaroni (with the key to the pasta puzzle):

Macaroni is a variety of dry pasta made with durum wheat. Elbow macaroni noodles normally do not contain eggs, (although they may be an optional ingredient) and are normally cut in short, hollow shapes; however, the term refers not to the shape of the pasta, but to the kind of dough from which the noodle is made. [In common usage, the term does indeed refer to the shape.]

… The name derives from Italian maccheroni, however Italians use maccheroni to refer to any form [of pasta] (link)

The Italian usage survives in the US in the product Rice-A-Roni (which involves vermicelli rather than elbow macaroni). From Wikipedia:

Rice-A-Roni is a product of PepsiCo’s subsidiary, the Quaker Oats Company. It is a boxed food mix that consists of rice, vermicelli pasta, and seasonings. To prepare, the rice and pasta are browned in butter, then water and seasonings are added and simmered until absorbed.

In 1895, Italian-born immigrant Domenico (“Charlie”) DeDomenico moved to California, where he set up a fresh produce store. A successful businessman, he married Maria Ferrigno from Salerno, Italy. Back home, her family owned a pasta factory, so in 1912 she persuaded him to set up a similar business in the Mission District of San Francisco. The enterprise became known as Gragnano Products, Inc. It delivered pasta to Italian stores and restaurants in the area.

Domenico’s sons, Paskey, Vince (1915–2007), Tom, and Anthony, worked with him. In 1934, Paskey changed the name to Golden Grain Macaroni Company. Inspired by the pilaf recipe she received from Mrs. Pailadzo Captanian, Tom’s wife, Lois, created a dish of rice and macaroni, which she served at a family dinner. In 1958, Vince invented Rice-A-Roni by adding a dry chicken soup mix to rice and macaroni. It was introduced in 1958 in the Northwestern United States and went nationwide four years later. Because of its origins, it was called “The San Francisco Treat!”.

Many people find it hard to hear the name Rice-A-Roni without hearing the “San Francisco Treat” jingle, as in this 1995 commercial:

Here’s an array of Rice-A-Roni products — the original chicken flavor and two of the many newer flavors:

  (#5)

So far, that’s two foods with names in aroni, -aroni, or -a-roni, combining a main ingredient name (beef, rice) with macaroni, either referring to elbow macaroni or to any kind of pasta.There are plenty of others, to the point where we might want to think of -aroni as a candidate for a libfix denoting a pasta casserole. There’s at least chickaroni (chicken), hamaroni, turkaroni (turkey), sausage-aroni, and lamb-a-roni. Even a Cheesearoni Beef Casserole (with mozzarella, parmesan, and cottage cheese). Then, more inventively, there’s Rach-aroni paella from Rachel Ray, involving vermicelli, rice, peas, chorizo sausage, and chicken; smackaroni and cheese, with macaroni, cubed longhorn, and cubed swiss; mushroom faux-a-roni (a Rice-a-Roni from scratch recipe, using cut or broken spaghetti); and fake-aroni and cheese, made from cauliflower heads, cheddar cheese, and cream cheese (but no pasta). No doubt there are more.

It began with the porn flick Twinkalicious (a 5-hour compilation of scenes featuring twink sex, that is, sex between twinks). The front cover of the DVD (showing a twink sucking cock) and the back cover (a montage of twinks in heat) can be viewed in the posting “Twinkalicious porn” on AZBlogX (where such images are allowed). The word twinkalicious has two parts, the twink part (with a piece of sexuality slang) and the -licious part (related in some way to delicious). I’ll comment on both parts. But first, some other combinations of these two parts.

More -licious sex. Next up: a series of three Twink-A-Licious porn flicks, the front covers of which are (just barely) WordPressable:

   (#1)

Summary of the action in this flick (courtesy of the blogger 8TeenBoy) on the TLA Video site, here.

  (#2)

  (#3)

My “Twinkalicious porn” posting has the back cover of the first of these (#3 there), an extremely crowded montage of twink sex.

Then came two bloggers, one using the name Twinkilicious, the other the name Twinkielicious.

Finally, there’s a Twinkylicious porn site; the image from the home page on the Twinkylicious.com site (which offers huge numbers of films of twinkies having sex, plus still photos of hot twinkies) is #4 in my “Twinkalicious porn” posting. And there’s also a Twinkylicious Bareback porn site.

So there is variation in the way twink / twinkie / twinky gets combined with -(V)licious: twinkalicious, twink-a-licious, twinkilicious, twinkielicious, twinkylicious. Compare these to my treatment of scruffalicious and scruffilicious.

On twink and twinkie. (Twinky is sometimes found as a variant of the usual twinkie.) Discussion of these items (and on the Hostess snack food) in a posting of mine on male photographer Howard Roffman, who specializes in twinks. Here’s an Urban Dictionary entry (by M. Alan Wood 2/17/08) on twinkalicious that makes a stab at defining twink:

Formed by a combination of the words twink and delicious. It is used as an adjective to describe a very attractive young white male. Twinks tend to be under 25 years old, slim, no body hair, stylish hair and clothing, enjoy clubbing, effeminate and somewhat arrogant. They are also considered to be the ultimate prize for many older gay males, a trophy boyfriend.

Twinkalicious can also be used to describe a situation or setting.

Have you been to the new club downtown? I heard it is twinkalicious. Packed wall to wall with hotties.

This entry has several of the problems that afflict UD entries (some discussion here). It describes a stereotype of the twink, injects the writer’s opinions and attitudes, and adds side information that’s not really relevant to the definition.

For the record: twinks are by no means all white — there are Asian and Asian American twinks of several ethnicities, and some black ones as well — and many are in no way effeminate, or arrogant, for that matter. What they do have is youthful male beauty, embodying the ideal of Apollo rather than Priapus. There are muscle twinks and preppy twinks and even leather twinks. Light body hair doesn’t disqualify a young man from twinkhood, but there are limits. Serious facial scruff moves you towards Priapus territory, but a small beard, for instance a goatee, is fine (indeed, the cocksucking twink on the front cover of the Twinkalicious DVD — #1 in “Twinkalicious porn” — has a modest goatee).

As with all social categories, the central members of the TWINK category are easy to discern, but the boundaries of the category are fuzzy, and many men will clearly belong neither to TWINK nor to one of its alternatives, like BEAR.

On -licious. From a 2009 posting of mine on “Liciousness”:

On her Fritinancy blog, Nancy Friedman has recently posted (under the heading “the tastiest suffix”) an inventory of playful -licious brand names and brand descriptors, from Bake-a-Licious through Zombielicious. The -licious words come up every so often on Language Log, starting with 2006 postings by me (here) and Ben Zimmer (here), and going on with additional examples in 2007 (here) and this year (here).

In my 2006 posting, I wrote that:

there are cites of babelicious and blackalicious from 1992, which seems to have been a particularly morpholicious year.  The larger point is that -Vlicious words are likely to have been invented independently on many occasions, as portmanteaus, leading eventually to the emergence of the jocular suffix.  Some innovations in language have no clear single moment of creation, but arise as natural re-workings of the material of a language, by many different hands.

That is, -(V)licious is moving into libfix territory. In a 2011 posting on “Pornmanteaus”, I noted the  following items with “libfixes or incipient libfixes” attached to the base porn (relevant ones for this posting boldfaced):

pornacious, pornastrophe / porntastrophe, pornerrific, porneteria / pornoteria, pornilicous / pornalicious, pornmageddon / pornageddon, pornocaplypse / pornpocalypse, pornorarama, pornoscopic, pornotopic, pornovision, pornplex / pornoplex, porntastic, pornucopia, pornvalanche / pornalanche, pornzilla

For most of these, the semantic contribution of the combining element has been bleached to some degree, a point I expanded on in a 2012 posting on portmanteaus:

The appearance of dicktionary in [a] product description reminded me of another family of portmanteau words: cocktacular, cocktastic, cockalicious; dicktacular, dicktastic, dickalicious (cock / dick + spectacular / fantastic / delicious). All are in the Urban Dictionary. Some of them have uses related to sex, but mostly they seem to be generically positive adjectives (with cock or dick in there purely as attention-getters).

I’m inclined to see the various -(V)licious words based on twink(ie) in the same light: the final formative contributes merely (strong) positive affect, rather than attributing sensory deliciousness. Some -(V)licious words do look more like portmanteaus; from my 2012 posting:

Then there’s Dickalicious, an “edible penis arousal gel”, available in four flavors: banana, strawberry, raspberry, pina colada. [The gel provides you with a delicious dick.]

But most seem to have a generically positive libfix. In particular, a twinkalicious young man is a hot twink, not necessarily literally delicious. And a twinkalicious club is one that’s well supplied with such men.

For the Fourth of July (Independence Day) weekend, an advertising campaign on the TLA Adult Gay Video site:

Celebrate Foreskindependence

(intended: foreskin + independence).

Meanwhile, for some time now the 76 gasoline firm (formerly Union 76) has been running a tv ad campaign against honkaholism (honk + alcoholism, or possibly honk + the libfix -aholism), an addiction to honking.

The first turns out not to convey the intended meaning — an Independence Day sale — very well; foreskins are not centrally involved in the matter, and in any case the term could be parsed as foreskin + dependence.

The second is clever and cute, but becomes annoying on repetition.

Foreskindependence. A preference for uncut men (men with intact foreskins) is a well-known taste of many gay men, and numerous videos cater specifically to this taste (while others cater to a taste for cut men), so even if you parse foreskindependence in the intended fashion, you’ll expect that the sale has something specifically to do with foreskins. But in fact, here are the main terms of the sale:

Freedom to Save Super Sale!
Get up to 25% off your entire order!
We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men (and women too) have a divine right to save huge, up to 25% off their order! Express your independence by buying anything and everything you want. Spend $49.99 and you’ll automatically get an extra 15% off your entire order. Spend $99.99 and you’ll automatically get an extra 20% off your order. Most fabulously of all, spend $149.99 or more and you’ll automatically get an extra 25% off your entire order! The more you buy, the more you save! This is why we fought the British, people. Do your patriotic duty and start shopping now!

Foreskins don’t come into it at all. It’s all about freedom, rights, and patriotism.

Honkaholism. From the NYT on 4/1/13, “Gasoline Brand Urges Drivers to Stop ‘Honkaholism’ “ by Stuart Elliott:

Efforts by a leading gasoline brand [76] to woo consumers in a nontraditional fashion are continuing with a light-hearted initiative aimed at discouraging a particularly annoying kind of vehicular noise pollution.

… The initiative urges drivers to stop “honkaholism” — the incessant beeping of car horns that bothers passengers, pedestrians and other drivers. It is styled like a public service campaign aimed at eradicating a societal ill, seeking to make people aware of the problem and then offering a solution.

For instance, the commercial — which can be watched on the special Web site, stophonkaholism.com, as well as on television — starts with an angry man behind the wheel of a car at a crosswalk, is honking loudly as bewildered children stare.

“Is your honking out of control?” a calm-voiced announcer asks. “You might be showing signs of honkaholism.”

“Now you can put an end to all the beeping honking,” the announcer continues, “with the 76 Honk Suppressor.” The reference is to the giveaway item, a toy shaped like a hockey puck that bears a resemblance to the Easy button from the Staples retail chain.

At the center of the Honk Suppressor, which can be attached to a dashboard, is a piece of red rubber or plastic bearing the 76 brand logo; when pressed down upon, it makes a bleating sound like a child’s doll or a dog’s squeaky toy.

The Honk Suppressor is “the perfectly safe honking alternative,” the announcer declares, “designed to wean even the most beeping honkers off their beeping.”

(Note the taboo-avoiding bleeping.)

I found this entertaining the first few times it came around. But eventually it became as annoying as, well, honking.

And I wonder whether the commercial has been effective — something that’s notoriously hard to gauge.

It started with the Batmobile, Batman’s astounding car (which first appeared in 1966). Batmobile looks like a portmanteau of Batman and automobile, but both parts are more complex than that.

A collection of Batmobile models over the years:

(#1)

Let’s start with Batman (at first, the Bat-Man). This is a straightforward compound of bat and man, referring to a man who has some of the properties of a bat. The compound has primary accent on its first element, with a lesser accent on the second, a pattern that it shares with Superman, Starman, and some other proper names, including the invention Jockstrap Man of a recent posting of mine. The pattern contrasts with other one that has an unaccented second element, as in Frenchman and salesman.

Batmobile has the second element -mobile, last discussed on this blog in connection with the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile:

Wienermobile is a portmanteau of wiener and automobile, formally similar to Oldsmobile. The element -mobile is on its way to becoming a libfix, in that it can now be attached to virtually any personal name, to jocularly denote a car belonging to that person: Zwickymobile, Arnoldmobile, etc.

(and the Popemobile, of course).

Now, back to Batmobile. Its first element isn’t just bat, referring to the creature, but is an allusion to Batman, the superhero — another libfix, this time prefixed (like bro-) rather that postfixed.

From the Batman article in Wikipedia:

In proper practice, the “bat” prefix (as in batmobile or batarang) is rarely used by Batman himself when referring to his equipment, particularly after some portrayals (primarily the 1960s Batman live-action television show and the Super Friends animated series) stretched the practice to campy proportions. The 1960s television series Batman has an arsenal that includes such “bat-” names as the bat-computer, bat-scanner, bat-radar, bat-cuffs, bat-pontoons, bat-drinking water dispenser, bat-camera with polarized bat-filter, bat-shark repellent bat-spray, and bat-rope.

… When Batman is needed, the Gotham City police activate a searchlight with a bat-shaped insignia over the lens called the Bat-Signal, which shines into the night sky, creating a bat-symbol on a passing cloud which can be seen from any point in Gotham. The origin of the signal varies, depending on the continuity and medium.

In various incarnations, most notably the 1960s Batman TV series, Commissioner Gordon also has a dedicated phone line, dubbed the Bat-Phone, connected to a bright red telephone (in the TV series) which sits on a wooden base and has a transparent cake cover on top. The line connects directly to Batman’s residence

… The Batcave is Batman’s secret headquarters, consisting of a series of subterranean caves beneath his mansion, Wayne Manor. It serves as his command center for both local and global surveillance, as well as housing his vehicles and equipment for his war on crime. It also is a storeroom for Batman’s memorabilia.

(And Batman wears a batsuit.)

On the Batmobile:

The car has evolved along with the character from comic books to television and films reflecting evolving car technologies. Kept in the Batcave accessed through a hidden entrance, the gadget-laden car is used by Batman in his crime-fighting activities. (Wikipedia link)

And the Batplane:

The Batplane, later known as the Batwing, is the fictional aircraft for the comic book superhero Batman. The vehicle was introduced in “Batman Versus The Vampire, I”, published in Detective Comics #31 in 1939, a story which saw Batman travel to continental Europe.  In this issue it was referred to as the “Batgyro”, and according to Les Daniels was “apparently inspired by Igor Sikorsky’s first successful helicopter flight” of the same year. Initially based upon either an autogyro or helicopter, with a rotor, the Batgyro featured a bat motif at the front. The writers gave the Batgyro the ability to be “parked” in the air by Batman, hovering in such a way as to maintain its position and allow Batman to return.

The Batgyro was soon replaced by the Batplane, which debuted in Batman #1, and initially featured a machine gun. The vehicle was now based on a fixed wing airplane rather than a helicopter, with a propeller at the front, although a bat motif was still attached to the nose-cone. (Wikipedia link)

In addition, there’s a Batboat, a Batcopter, a Batcycle, and a Bat-sub.

And the other Bat-people:

Batgirl is the name of several fictional characters appearing in comic books published by DC Comics, depicted as female counterparts to the superhero Batman. (Wikipedia link)

Batwoman is a fictional character, a superheroine who appears in comic books published by DC Comics. In all incarnations, Batwoman is a wealthy heiress who—inspired by the notorious superhero Batman—chooses, like him, to put her wealth and resources towards funding a war on crime in her home of Gotham City.

… The modern Batwoman is written as being of Jewish descent and as a lesbian in an effort by DC editorial staff to diversify its publications and better connect to modern-day readership. (Wikipedia link)

there was one instance in continuity when Bruce Wayne adopted the Robin persona. In Batboy & Robin, a tie-in special to the DC Comics storyline Sins of Youth, Bruce and Tim Drake, the third Robin, had their ages magically switched. In an effort to keep up the illusion of Batman, Bruce had Tim adopt the Batman identity while he is forced to be Robin. (Wikipedia link for Robin)

Outside of the Batman world, there’s another, more entertaining, Bat Boy:

Bat Boy is a fictional creature who made several appearances in the defunct American supermarket tabloid Weekly World News. The Weekly World News published patently fabricated stories which were purported to be factual. Within the pages of the paper, Bat Boy is described as a creature who is ‘half human and half bat’. His pursuers, according to Weekly World News, are scientists and United States government officials; he is frequently captured, then later makes a daring escape. The original scientist who found him was named Dr. Bob Dillon. Matthew Daemon, S.O.S. (Seeker of Obscure Supernaturals) crossed paths with him on several occasions.

Bat Boy was created by former Weekly World News Editor Dick Kulpa. He debuted as a cover story on June 23, 1992. The original front-page photo of Bat Boy, showing his grotesque screaming face, was the second-best selling issue in the tabloid’s history, and he has since evolved into a pop-culture icon. He became the tabloid’s de facto mascot of sorts. The story of Bat Boy was turned into an Off-Broadway musical, Bat Boy: The Musical. (Wikipedia link)

(#2)

Some more short takes, on a notable person, avoidance of non-taboo words, wordless instructions, typefaces, and a libfix.

1. John Lewis. In the NYT on the 14th, a substantial piece by Sheryl Gay Stolberg on John Lewis, “Still Marching on Washington, 50 Years Later”:

Washington — John Lewis was the 23-year-old son of Alabama sharecroppers and already a veteran of the civil rights movement when he came to the capital 50 years ago this month to deliver a fiery call for justice on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Today Mr. Lewis is a congressman from Georgia and the sole surviving speaker from the March on Washington in August 1963. His history makes him the closest thing to a moral voice in the divided Congress. At 73, he is still battling a half-century later.

Lewis is a hero of mine (and I was startled to realize that we are the same age).

On the MoW, from Wikipedia:

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom or “The Great March on Washington”, as styled in a sound recording released after the event, was one of the largest political rallies for human rights in United States history and called for civil and economic rights for African Americans. It took place in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, August 28, 1963. Martin Luther King, Jr., standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, delivered his historic “I Have a Dream” speech advocating racial harmony…

King’s great speech overshadowed Lewis’s at the time, but Lewis went on to a distinguished career in politics and is currently fighting the retreat on the Voting Rights Act.

2. Bizarre taboo avoidance. First, from Robert Coren, in a comment on my “Fie on tech” posting:

I thought of the semi-baffling taboo avoidance I mentioned the other day, namely espn.com’s editing a quoted tweet to call someone a “jacka–”.

Ass avoidance, even though the ass of jackass (the name of an animal) is a different lexeme from ass ‘buttocks, anus’.

And then, even more bizarrely, in One Million Moms’ sniffy commentary on the Kraft ads featuring Zesty Anderson Davis:

A full 2-page ad features a n*ked man lying on a picnic blanket with only a small portion of the blanket barely covering his g*nitals. It is easy to see what the ad is really selling.

This isn’t really taboo word avoidance — more like taboo idea avoidance achieved by concealing (entirely inexpertly) non-taboo vocabulary in the domain.

3. Communicating through drawings and gestures. From Derek Wyckoff, his captioning of a drawing about Ikea and its reliance on wordless instructions (intended to be usable by speakers of any language):

4. Mixed case. In the Talk of the Town section of the New Yorker on 6/24/13, from “Clarity” by Katia Bachko:

New York City street signs have been shouting [in all-caps] for years. But soon  the city will provide a more subdued directional experience [with mixed-case signs]

… [According to Donald Meeker and James Montalbano, the designers of the new typeface,] the benefits of mixed case go beyond politesse; readers identify words by their shapes. When “Church Street” is set in mixed case, the pattern of verticals and curves helps drivers make out the words more quickly

5. Pseudonyms and pen names. In the NYT Sunday Review of 7/27/13, in the “Draft” column, “A Writer by Any Other Name”:

After J. K. Rowling admitted that she, and not a military veteran named “Robert Galbraith,” wrote the new mystery novel “The Cuckoo’s Calling,” The New York Times asked several writers to choose a hypothetical pen name and describe what kind of book they might write under — or perhaps behind — that name. (Note: This informal survey was conducted before any of them had a chance to consider “Carlos Danger” as an option.)

The writers and the names they suggested:

André Aciman: Valerie Scott Smythe, Lydia Davis: Percy, Ben Fountain: B. E. Fountainhead, Carl Hiassen: Rick O’Morris, Anne Lamott: Dr. Morris Fishback, Stacy Schiff: P. G. Wodehouse, Rebecca Skloot: Rhoda Stokol, John Wray [a pseudonym]: John Henderson [real name]

The full piece has the writers suggesting genres for their alter egos and discussing their choices.

6. Bots. From the NYT Sunday Review of 8/11/13, the beginning of “I Flirt and Tweet. Follow Me at #Socialbot.” by Ian Urbina (with the relevant words bold-faced):

From the earliest days of the Internet, robotic programs, or bots, have been trying to pass themselves off as human. Chatbots greet users when they enter an online chat room, for example, or kick them out when they get obnoxious. More insidiously, spambots indiscriminately churn out e-mails advertising miracle stocks and unattended bank accounts in Nigeria. Bimbots deploy photos of gorgeous women to hawk work-from-home job ploys and illegal pharmaceuticals.

Now come socialbots. These automated charlatans are programmed to tweet and retweet.

Three occurrences of the libfix bot, one of bot in the portmanteau bimbot (bimbo + bot), and one of bot as as an independent word. Bots everywhere.

The libfix bot has made it into Michael Quinion’s affixes list, as a word-forming element. Quinion’s entry:

Automatic or autonomous device or software program.
[The ending of English robot.]

Robot, an automatic or programmable machine, originally one resembling a human being, derives from Czech robota, forced labour.

One sense, directly derived from the concept of a robot, is that of an autonomous device, usually mobile, with a degree of awareness derived from computer technology; many examples are found in scientific or science fiction contexts, but few have become widely known. Examples include nanobot (Greek nanos, dwarf), a hypothetical robot of molecular dimensions; cryobot (Greek kruos, frost), a NASA-invented device for penetrating deep ice layers to examine what lies beneath; killerbot, an autonomous military killing machine; biobot, a robot which mimics biological behaviour.

The more common sense is of a semi-autonomous software program, usually linked to networking and especially to the Internet and the World Wide Webb. Well-known examples include cancelbot, a program that searches for and deletes specified mailings from Internet newsgroups; knowbot, a program which has reasoning and decision-making capabilities; and spambot, a program which scans Web pages in order to harvest e-mail addresses to which unsolicited commercial advertising (spam) can be sent.

Bot also exists as a word in its own right, in reference to a device of either kind.

Only spambot is shared by Urbina’s list and Quinion’s.

Scrolled past in the avalanche of spam this morning, a penis enlargement ad that promised to give me Cockzilla. Surprisingly, I hadn’t noticed this use of the libfix -zilla (from Godzilla) before — but it’s all over porn, straight and gay. And it’s spawned Blackzilla and Whitezilla, in which the cock is silent (but understood).

On -zilla in this blog:

– 12/22/08, Portmansnow words (link): snowtastrophe, snowpocalypse, snowmageddon, snowzilla

– 5/22/11, Portmanteau to libfix (link): beginning with Glennzilla, a reference to Glenn Greenwald; and then:

The libfix -zilla (connoting size, significance, awesomeness, or fearsomeness) hasn’t made it into Michael Quinion’s affixes site yet, but instances have been chronicled elsewhere:

mumzilla (here) and planzilla (here) in the Double-Tongued Dictionary
promzilla (here) and bridezilla (here) in Word Spy
panty-hose-zilla (here), beardzilla (here), and godcomplexzilla (here) in Wordlustitude

No doubt there are many more impressive -zillas to be found.

– 4/17/12, Flymanteaus (link): including Flyzilla

Then on to Cockzilla (with variants CockZilla and Cock-Zilla). Two videos featuring women: Cockzilla in My Pussy (link) and Ricki White Cockzilla in My Ass (link). (An astonishing amount of ass-fucking goes on in straight porn.) Then a jack-off video entitled CockZilla. And another jack-off video on the Cockenstein blog (that’s a portmanteau with Frankenstein, of course; the blog specializes in monster cocks), with this text:

Well well well, let me introduce you to Cockzilla. I have to say, I’m kinda digging the name. and of course his giant 12 inch piece of uncut meat.
Cockenstein vs Cockzilla??
You know I’d be down for the contest! Damm, how do you warm your ass up for a cock that big?

Then there a fair number of sites with Blackzilla, referring to a huge black cock, for instance

Nichole Heiress sucking a blackzilla clean (link)

And then big-dicked porn actor Rod Spunkel (how’s that for a porn name?), who sometimes acts under the name Whitezilla (link); teaser trailer here for:

Whitezilla, The Big Dick Honkey: This White Boy Knows How to Fill Up That Ass

(This is straight porn, but Spunkel also does gay porn.)

Two recent items from the magazine The Week: Neal Whitman on libfixes, James Harbeck on apostrophes. Both with humor.

From Neal on the 17th, “A linguistic tour of the best libfixes, from -ana to -zilla It’s a listacular wordgasm!”:

Here’s an alphabetically organized (but by no means exhaustive) list of libfixes in a column for TheWeek.com. Links to posts by Arnold Zwicky and articles by Ben Zimmer and Nancy Friedman. Also special thanks to Ben for filling in my gap for the letter U with ‘-umentary’in a comment.

And from James on the 18th, “Kill the apostrophe! We would all be better off without it”. Yes, exactly what it says, with arguments.

From Karen Chung on Facebook, this story from 8/21/12 (note the date), “The Latest Chinese Beach Craze – Face-kini”:

A new kind of swimwear trend is sweeping the Chinese beaches in Qingdao in eastern China’s Shandong province. As the weather get hotter, both men and women are seen appearing on the beaches wearing full body suits that cover from head to toe. The upper part of the swimsuit has a ski-mask with holes cut out at appropriate places to leave the eyes, nose and mouth exposed, giving the wearer an odd Lucha libre look. The Netizens are calling the swimwear “face-kinis”

The mask[s] are a way for Chinese bathers to protect their skin from the sunburn, but it turns out that they are equally handy at repelling insects and jellyfish.

Masks worn by women and by men:

(#1)

(#2)

And a collection of Lucha libre masks:

(#3)

On Lucha libre, from Wikipedia:

Lucha libre (… “free wrestling”) is a term used in Mexico, and other Spanish-speaking countries, for a form of professional wrestling that has developed within those countries. Although the term nowadays refers exclusively to professional wrestling, it was originally used in the same style as the English term “freestyle wrestling”, referring to an amateur wrestling style without the restrictions of Greco-Roman wrestling.

Mexican wrestling is characterized by colorful masks, rapid sequences of holds and maneuvers, as well as “high-flying” maneuvers, some of which have been adopted in the United States.

And now on -kini words. Their last appearance on this blog was in connection with nun-kini, in a posting where I wrote:

-kini words came by here last year, in this posting, which starts with bikini, goes on to monokini and trikini, and then:

Other innovations in -kini (see the Wikipedia page on bikini variants): microkini (super small), tankini (with tank top), pubikini (exposing pubic hair), veilkini (for modesty). The element -kini ’(women’s) bathing suit’ seems to be on its way to becoming a libfix

A story that combines libfixes, extraordinary animals, and science reporting. From Stan Carey yesterday, a pointer to this BBC News science story, “ ’Platypus-zilla’ fossil unearthed in Australia” by Rebecca Morelle:

Part of a giant platypus fossil has been unearthed in Queensland, Australia. Scientists have dubbed the beast “platypus-zilla” and believe it would have measured more than 1m long (3ft).

Writing in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, the researchers say the creature lived between five and 15 million years ago.

… Today, all that survives of this platypus is a single fossilised tooth, which was unearthed in the Riversleigh fossil beds in northwest Queensland.

Based on its size, the researchers have estimated that the new species (Obdurodon tharalkooschild) would have been at least twice as large as today’s platypus.

Bumps on its teeth and other fossil finds nearby suggest that the creature feasted on crustaceans, turtles, frogs and fish.

Science reporting in BBC News is notoriously unreliable (as Language Log writers repeatedly point out), but let’s take this story as basically faithful to the academic sources (while noting the playful name platypus-zilla rather than the expected common name Giant Platypus and observing that the historical creature is reconstructed from a single tooth).

On the common or garden platypus, from Wikipedia:

The platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) is a semiaquatic mammal endemic to eastern Australia, including Tasmania. Together with the four species of echidna, it is one of the five extant species of monotremes, the only mammals that lay eggs instead of giving birth.

… The unusual appearance of this egg-laying, duck-billed, beaver-tailed, otter-footed mammal baffled European naturalists when they first encountered it, with some considering it an elaborate fraud. It is one of the few venomous mammals, the male platypus having a spur on the hind foot that delivers a venom capable of causing severe pain to humans.

… The common name “platypus” is the latinisation of the Greek word πλατύπους (platupous), “flat-footed”, from πλατύς (platus), “broad, wide, flat” and πούς (pous), “foot”.

(As a flat-footed person, I admire the name platypus.)

Then there’s the name platypus-zilla. Words in -zilla have come up here several times; this posting has links to earlier stuff. Almost all X-zilla words have monosyllabic X; from my files:

X = snow, Glenn, mum, plan, prom, bride, beard, fly, cock, black, white

with the notable exceptions panty-hose-zilla and godcomplexzilla, both with trisyllabic X. To which we can now add the trisyllabic (but similarly front-accented) X platypus. A bit on the awkward side, but serviceable.

Two items for (U.S.) Thanksgiving: once more on Thanksgivuk(k)ah, and the entertaining tryptophantastic.

1. Thanksgivuk(k)ah again. The rare confluence of (U.S.) Thanksgiving and Hanukkah has been all over the net, including on this blog (because of the awkward portmanteau that has resulted). Now one more time, in the cartoon Rhymes With Orange:

(#1)

2. tryptophantastic. An ad on the woot! site for the holiday:

(#2)

Tryptophan + the -tastic of fantastic. The element -tastic has a life of its own as a libfix (see here). As for tryptophan, here’s Wikipedia:

A common assertion is that heavy consumption of turkey meat results in drowsiness, due to high levels of tryptophan contained in turkey. However, the amount of tryptophan in turkey is comparable to that contained in most other meats. Furthermore, post-meal drowsiness may have more to do with what else is consumed along with the turkey and, in particular, carbohydrates.

Three recent items: robophobic, fungineering, fracktacular. Three sightinga, among many for each of these.

robophobic. From Maureen Dowd in the NYT, “Mommy, the Drone’s Here”, 12/4/13:

Law enforcement agencies are eager to get drones patrolling the beat. And The Wrap reported that in the upcoming Sony remake of “RoboCop,” Samuel L. Jackson’s character, a spokesman for a multinational conglomerate that has to manufacture a special RoboCop with a conscience for America (still traumatized by “The Terminator,” no doubt) scolds Americans for being “robophobic.”

Of course, for the robophopic [robotropic would be the usual opposite], there is already a way to get goods almost immediately: Go to the store.

robophobe, robophobia, robophobic all involve the combining form -phobe.

fungineering. From Oliver Burkeman in the NYT, “Who Goes to Work to Have Fun?”, 12/12/13:

Enjoyable jobs are surely preferable to boring or unpleasant ones; moreover, studies suggest that happy employees are more productive ones. But it doesn’t follow that the path to this desirable state of affairs is through deliberate efforts, on the part of managers, to try to generate fun. Indeed, there’s evidence that this approach — which has been labeled, suitably appallingly, “fungineering” — might have precisely the opposite effect, making people miserable and thus reaffirming one of the oldest observations about happiness: When you try too hard to obtain it, you’re almost guaranteed to fail.

This one is a relatively straightforward portmanteau (fun + engineering).

fractacular. A head from the Economist of 12/23/13, p. 12, about the U.S. passion for fracking: fractackular: frack plus the libfix -tacular (originally from spectacular), which has come up in these precincts on several occasions.

The libfix -gate seems to be irresistible, trotted out for all sorts of public fusses; discussion here. Recent example, reported by Victor Steinbok on ADS-L:

According to MediaBistro, there’s now yet another -gate. Newly crowned NYC Mayor [Bill de Blasio] was caught on camera eating pizza with a fork, which is sacrilege in NYC. Appropriately, the affair has been dubbed “forkgate”, lack of coverup notwithstanding…

Like most -gate formations, this will surely be short-lived. Then Joel Berson suggested on ADS-L that Gate-gate is likely to come upon us,

for the scandalous way in which the former Secretary of Defense [Gates] has dissed the present VPOTUS

Previously coined for a silly British scandal involving David Cameron, detailed in 2012 here (among other places).

And then Larry Horn chimed in with some overlap portmanteaus involving -gate:

two of my fave combo-gates, Underwatergate (the blowing up of the Greenpeace ship the Rainbow Warrior by, as it turned out, agents of the French government) and Pearlygate (one or maybe more of the televangelist brouhahas).  I may be missing a couple…oh, right, Whitewatergate.  Love those overlaps.

In the news recently, stories about the chemical spill in West Virginia, now widely labeled the Aquapocalpse — with the libfix -pocalypse used in denoting a disaster, but not (as you might at first have thought) a flood, but instead a different type of watery disaster.

There’s even a song. From the West Virginia Gazette-Mail on January 22nd, “The ‘Aquapocalypse’ gets one of its first songs”:

Charleston WV. They’re certainly not going to be the only ones, but T.J. King and Kevin Kidd are among the first out of the box with a [country] song about the water crisis. Titled “Aquapocalypse in West Virginia,” the song, with added sound clips, was featured on the “Throw Down a Song Thursday” segment Jan. 16 on radio station Electric 102.7.

From the 4/7/14 New Yorker, in “Chemical Valley” by Evan Osnos, p. 47, some words:

I smell freedom in my shower. I smell freedom in my sink. I will shower in my freedom, but my freedom I won’t drink.

Aquapocalypse has been used before, also to refer to environmental degradation. From a story of 5/1/10:

Aquapocalypse: Greater Boston residents told to boil water as six-year-old aqueduct fails

In television commercials that recently came past me: yummify (and more) in a 5-hour ENERGY commercial; and waffulicious in an IHOP commercial.

yummify etc. On this site, a commercial exhorting us to “Yummify your 5-hour ENERGY” (and prominently featuring a lumberjack, presumably because lumberjacks are really energetic). In addition to yummify and yummification, we get the playful portmanteaus yummbelievable, yummazing, and yummtastic.

A note on the product, from Wikipedia:

5-hour Energy (stylized as 5-hour ENERGY) is a flavored “energy shot” brand made by Living Essentials in Wabash, Indiana, whose parent firm is Innovation Ventures in Farmington Hills, Michigan…The company states that the product is not approved by the U.S Food and Drug Administration, is vegetarian and certified Kosher, and contains no sugar or herbal stimulants. [But it has plenty of caffeine, apparently.]

Three states – Oregon, Vermont, Washington – filed lawsuits accusing 5-Hour Energy’s makers of deceptive marketing.

Now, yummify: a playful formation, yummy + -ify, giving a causative ‘ make yummy’ or ‘make more yummy’. From Urban Dictionary, from JillFit on 10/16/13:

To make a traditionally bland, plain or gross food product or item more delicious.

And on yummy, from NOAD2:

informal adj. (of food)  delicious: yummy pumpkin cakes.

• highly attractive and desirable: I scooped up this yummy young man.

ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from yum + -y.

Going back to yum:

informal exclam. used to express pleasure at eating, or at the prospect of eating, a particular food.

ORIGIN late 19th cent.: imitative.

That is, imitative of a sound (some) people make when enjoying food.

waffulicious. At the IHOP (International House of Pancakes) site for Belgian waffles,some picked out as waffulicious waffles ‘especially tasty waffles’, with the libfix -(V)licious, extracted from portmanteaus of the form X + delicious.

A note on spelling. The intention of the commercial’s creators was clearly that the word should have four syllables, preserving the syllabic l of waffle (as schwa + /l/). So WAFFLICIOUS wouldn’t do, because that would be pronounced with three syllables. WAFFLEICIOUS would work, but the medial EI is awkward. What we want is WAFFL- plus -V-LICIOUS, for some vowel letter V: WAFFALICIOUS, WAFFELICIOUS, WAFFLILIOUS, WAFFLOLICIOUS, WAFFULICIOUS. WAFFOLICIOUS is probably a bad choice, because the O could be pronounced /o/ (rather than schwa), as in dyn-o-mite!. The creators probably went with U as representing schwa most effectively.

But then -(V)licious. Previous postings on the libfix (the first two are the most important):

AZ on Language Log 9/4/06: “-Vlicious invention”

BZ on Language Log 9/5/06: “The surreptitious history of –licious”

AZ on Language Log 3/1/07: “Get Fuzzy gets playful”

ML on Language Log 9/10/09: “Schadenfreudelicious”

AZ on Language Log 12/11/09: “Liciousness”

AZ on this blog 6/11/13: “-licious sex”, on twinkalicious and its variants

A recent ad for Daedalus books, spotted in the latest issue of Harper’s magazine, and no doubt in other bookish publications:

The libfix -tastic, extracted from fantastic, has here been whittled down a bit further to -astic and tacked onto daedalus. (daedalustastic would have been possible, but daedalusastic is shorter and neater.)

On the company, from Wikipedia:

Daedalus Books is an independent seller of books, music, and video founded in 1980. While it also sells new titles, Daedalus Books’ specialty is the remaindered book. Its philosophy is to keep bestsellers, classics, and overlooked gems available to the reading public.

Background on the libfix, starting with a 1/21/05 posting by Ben Zimmer on ADS-L:

Grant Barrett has a new DTWW [Double-Tongued Word Wrestler] entry for the suffix “-tacular”. Grant found cites for nominal forms back to 1958 (“spook-tacular”), but adjectival forms (e.g., “craptacular”) only date to the mid-’90s.

I’d guess that the “X-tacular” adjectives were modeled on “X-tastic”, which became a productive formation for US advertisers in the ’60s… a quick scan of Newspaperarchive shows “shoe-tastic” (1966), “carpet-tastic” (1966), “fang-tastic” (1968), “shag-tastic” (1969), “swim-tastic” (1970), etc. (During the NFL players’ strike of 1987, David Letterman had a Top Ten list called “Top 10 Slogans of the Scab NFL”– the number one slogan was, “It’s scab-tastic!”).

But the granddaddy of them all is the obvious blend [i.e., portmanteau] “fun-tastic”:

1939 Los Angeles Times 27 Apr. 13/7 In-a-word description of the Ritz zanies: Fun-tastic.

1942 Nevada State Journal 27 Oct. 4/4 Fantastic and fun-tastic; manna for theater-goers who want “something different.”

1942 Nevada State Journal 17 Nov. 4/4 Fun-tastic nonsense guaranteed to tickle your sense of humor.

All three examples come from Jimmie Fidler’s syndicated column, “Fidler in Hollywood”.

On this blog, in a 12/27/08 posting (with the relevant items boldfaced here:

The appearance of dicktionary in the product description reminded me of another family of portmanteau words: cocktacular, cocktastic, cockalicious; dicktacular, dicktastic, dickalicious (cock / dick + spectacular / fantastic / delicious). All are in the Urban Dictionary. Some of them have uses related to sex, but mostly they seem to be generically positive adjectives (with cock or dick in there purely as attention-getters).

And in a 6/21/11 posting:

Awesometastic looks like awesome with the libfix -tastic (though most of the -tastic examples have a noun as first element: carpet-tastic, scab-tastic, dicktastic, etc.). But then playful word formation is, well, inventive.

And then, caught this morning on a Law & Order: SVU rerun:

She’s bangtastic! [from bang ‘fuck, screw’]

(Here the base is probably a verb, but could be a noun, and in this case the first element conveys sexual content and not just enthusiasm.)

Bangtastic gets an Urban Dictionary entry, and there’s even a Bang-tastic Worldwide Adult Directory, of female escorts.

Of course, there’s also a fucktastic, which appears to have both sexual uses, like bangtastic, and merely enthusiastic uses, like dicktastic and cocktastic: roughly ‘fucking fantastic’.

In the April 20th New Yorker, a fascinating story of a lost, and eventually found, Tlingit totem pole, in the Our Far-Flung Correspondents category: “The Tallest Trophy: A movie star made off with an Alaskan totem pole. Would it ever return home?” by Paige Williams.

In the midst of this, a portmanteau, Barrymoreabelia, combining Barrymore [John Barrymore, the actor in question] and memorabilia: ‘Barrymore memorabilia’. I suspect that the element -abelia has been “liberated” as an affix of its own — a libfix — but this is very hard to test, given the existence of a plant, the flowering shrub abelia (which I’d been meaning to post about, but this isn’t the occasion).

Some background from Williams’s piece:

Southeastern Alaska contains hundreds of islands cut by a vast network of channels and fjords. The biggest island, Prince of Wales, had the most totem poles, and the village with the greatest number was [the Tlingit village] Tuxecan. In 1916, a researcher counted a hundred and twenty-five poles there, and described them as strikingly elaborate and diverse in their imagery.

… One particularly regal pole loomed over the southeastern corner of a large house on the beach. Nearly thirty feet tall, it had three crests. The topmost figure was a bird with folded wings. Below it was a human, which held a large finned sea creature at the base of its tail. The bottom crest was a fierce, furry animal — a bear or a wolf — sitting high on its haunches. One day, in the nineteen-thirties, the totem pole went missing. All that remained was a sawed stump.

A photo of the pole:

Caption: John Barrymore, left, joked that “tribal gods” might “wreak vengeance on the thief.”

Partway through the story comes this quote from John Blyth Barrymore:]

My grandfather was quite a collector. Upon my grandmother’s death in March of 1979, my father, John Barrymore, and I began to enjoy a greatly improved standard of living supported by selling off the Barrymoreabelia we had pirated from her estate

followed by this comment from Williams:

The totem pole survived the Barrymoreabelia diaspora, at least temporarily.

Two occurrences of Barrymoreabilia, first from John Blyth Barrymore, then echoed by Williams.

Michael Quinion’s affixes site has one related entry, for –ana, discussed in a posting of mine from 1/17/11. More exactly, -(i)ana ‘things associated with a person, place, or field of interest’ (as in Shakespeariana). But the site has no entry (at the moment) for –abilia or –bilia.

The news for yesterday, from Inside Edition:

Saturday is scheduled to be the biggest day ever in sports history with “The Fight of the Century,” [Floyd Mayweather, Jr. vs. Manny Pacquiao] Kentucky Derby, the NBA and NHL playoffs, and the final day of the NFL Draft.

The New York Post is calling it “Sportsmaggedon.”

— using the libfix –maggedon, usually naming disasters, but here referring approvingly to a great spectacle. The disaster libfix –pocalypse has sometimes gone the same route: in my “The news for libfixes” of 1/14/13, there’s a rave for “Airpocalypse: America’s premier Air Band!”

(#1)

In both cases, a semantic component of great size or significance is preserved, but the affective polarity of the word is reversed: bad becomes good.

Background on the disaster libfixes (from 2011):

Back in 2008 there were the heavy snows, prompting cries of snowmageddon and snowpocalypse (and more) — portmansnow words. Then came the closing of I-405 in Los Angeles a little while back, yielding the words Carmageddon and Carpocalypse (and more; see here). Then last month the fierce heat waves, and yes, heatmageddon and heatpocalypse (and more).

The tradition continues. There’s a Hackmaggedon site (“I know with what weapons World War III will be fought…”) on computer security, hacking, and the like (security disasters); and Google’s algorithm changes to make its site mobile-friendly have been widely referred to as a disaster: Mobilemaggedon.

But all is not disaster, even in the computer world. For instance, there’s a Google app called Guitarmageddon (note the spelling):

Use Guitarmageddon to warm up, learn scale/chords/arpeggios, practice licks and develop technique. (link)

(#2)

The name is presumably supposed to convey that the app is really really cool.

Inverted meanings. From the Oxford Words Blog of 5/5/11, on “Inverted meanings: sick, bad, and wicked”:

A common trick of slang is to invert meanings, so that seemingly negative words are used as terms of approval. Bad and wicked are two established examples, although it may surprise you to see just how far back their positive uses go.

The OED records ‘bad’ and ‘wicked’ used in a positive sense as long ago as 1897 and 1920 respectively

Sick is a more recent arrival, first seen as a US synonym for ‘excellent’ or ‘very impressive’ in 1983

It’s not just adjectives; nouns can invert, too, as we see from yesterday’s Sportpocalypse.

The cover of the June 2015 Funny Times, by Matt Wuerker:

What caught my eye was panderthon, (roughly) ‘an interminable occasion of pandering’, with the libfix -(a)thon. The word is especially associated with political pandering, as here.

The libfix is covered on Michael Quinion’s Affixes site:

-athon After a vowel -thon. An event long in duration, usually for fund-raising purposes. [The last part of marathon, from Marathōn in Greece, the scene of a victory over the Persians in 490 BC.]

From the 1930s onwards, the ending of marathon was borrowed, originally in the US, to form words relating to some charitable activity. The first examples were walkathon, a long-distance walk organized as a fund-raising event, and radiothon, a prolonged radio broadcast by a person or group, similarly to raise money. Many examples have been created since, of which telethon, a long television programme to raise money for charity, has gone furthest towards general acceptance. Others are operathon, a marathon performance of opera; preachathon, an extended sermon; and swimathon, a sponsored swimming event. Some examples are facetious terms indicating an unreasonably extended happening, such as boreathon, an interminable occasion; plugathon, an extended advertisement for a product or person; and excuseathon, an over-extended apology for some mishap.

Note on the phonology. From Quinion’s entry, you would expect panderathon rather than panderthon, since pander ends in a consonant. That suggests that the relevant factor is not consonant vs. vowel, but accent or not on the preceding syllable: pander ends in an unaccented syllable. A test case: consider an interminable occasion of telling lies, a festival of lying; this would be a lieathon (-athon after an accented syllable), not a liethon, even though lie ends in a vowel.

But things are more complicated than that. Panderthon is reasonably well attested; two further examples:

The Rude Pundit: Random Observations on Last Night’s Republican Panderthon (link)

Iowa Panderthon Hits Homestretch (link)

But so is panderathon; two examples:

But Obama gets a bit better, even in the desultory context of an ongoing panderathon (link)

It looks like it’s going to be a knockdown, drag-out fight to the end between these two desperate contenders, to see who can secure the coveted conservative title of Wingnut Crown Price in the great Panderathon of 2006. (link)

So there’s variation. And in fact in this case –athon hugely outnumbers –thon (26,600 raw ghits for panderathon to 1,070 for panderthon). Other cases go the other way: comicthon with 1,460 raw ghits to comicathon with with 423.

As I understand the situation, when the preceding syllable is accented, the libfix is –athon; when it’s unaccented and ends in a vowel, the libfix is –thon (telethon, not teleathon); when it’s unaccented and ends in a consonant, there is variation.

Matt Wuerker. On the cartoonist, from Wikipedia:

Matt Wuerker is a political cartoonist for and founding staff member of Politico and winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.

… He has published two collections of cartoons, Standing Tall in Deep Doo Doo, A Cartoon Chronicle of the Bush Quayle Years (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991) and Meanwhile in Other News… A Graphic Look at Politics in the Empire of Money, Sex and Scandal (Common Courage Press, 1998). He illustrated the book The Madness of King George (Common Courage Press, 2003) by Michael K. Smith.

One previous Wuerker cartoon on this blog.

Five years ago I took note of the Teapartyganza segments on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show in 2010 (there’s a set of videos of the shows here). At the time, I took the name to be a one-off playful portmanteau (Tea Party + extravaganza), so I didn’t post about it; if I tried to take note of every portmanteau that comes past me, I’d go nuts.

Then in 2014, Eleganza came past me in a Zippy: Eleganza Fashions, a business that still seems to be going, So then there were two.

This morning, I stumbled upon my Teapartyganza note and thought to check on –ganza nouns. Oh my, it’s clearly gone the familiar route from portmanteau element to libfix (conveying, roughly, ‘an event of considerable size, scope, or complexity’): a Libfix-A-Ganza, to use one of the spellings that’s become customary in these situations.

On the item that contributes its –ganza to these formations, from NOAD2:

extravaganza  an elaborate and spectacular entertainment or production: an extravaganza of dance in many forms.

ORIGIN mid 18th cent. (in the sense ‘extravagance in language or behavior’): from Italian estravaganza ‘extravagance.’ The change was due to association with words beginning with extra- .

(Nice reshaping of the Italian to fit English patterns.)

The libfix has two variants, /ǝgænzǝ/ and /gænzǝ/, apparently with the long variant after consonants, the short variant after vowels. The short variant is sometimes set off from its base by a hyphen. The /ǝ/ of the long variant is spelled with an A or an O, and it is often set off on one or both sides by a hyphen.

Some examples of the long variant:

Drew Carey’s Improv-A-Ganza [an improv show on the Game Show Network] (IMDb link)

Travel-O-Ganza: The Melting Pot for Cultures and Education (link)

Boston Stoker Cigar-a-ganza [sale on cigars at the Boston Stoker Coffee Co. in Dayton OH] (link)

Explor-A-Ganza event {Cedar Valley Nonprofit Association in Northeast Iowa] (link]

The Queen’s 2013 Recap-a-ganza! [Bravo Fashion Queens show] (link)

More short instances of the short variant, in addition to Teapartyganza:

ALLMSES 3rd Annual Eco-Ganza Celebration [Alain L. Locke Magnet School
 for Environmental Stewardship, PS 208, in Harlem, New York] (link)

Agape-Ganza! [Open House at Camp Agapé, sponsored by N.C. Environmental Education, in Fuquay-Varina NC] (link)

I’m sure there are many more.

And the libfixes pour in. From Joel Berson on ADS-L yesterday, a report of ashvalanche ‘avalanche of ash’ (for two types of ash, with avalanche understood metaphorically). And that leads to plenty more examples of X-valanche.

Volcanic ash, coal ash. Berson, yesterday: “Heard on Boston WCVB local news at approximately 5:10–5:15 PM today”, a reference to an ashvalanche, “the recent eruption of Mount Sinabung in Indonesia that has sent an avalanche of, yes, ash down its slope”. He found about 20 raw Google Web hits, of which only two were interesting — one relevant to Mount Sinabung:

2015: WKOW 27 – WEB EXCLUSIVE: Check out this “Ashvalanche”. Video.

But also a 2009 mention from KnoxViews in East Tennessee, from commenter WhitesCreek: “The ashvalanche is bad enough and there is no need to exaggerate”. The background, from Berson: “When a dike failed at TVA’s Kingston Fossil Plant, 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash cascaded into the Emory and Clinch rivers and smothered about 300 acres of land.”

In both cases, we have a cascade of some substance, resembling the cascade of snow in an avalanche.

Searching on “valanche” pulls up a variety of examples, starting with the website for Ad-Valanche, a metaphorical avalanche of ads:

Welcome to Ad-Valanche! A universal way to boost your advertising budget and potentially earn extra income in a stand alone program.

Then some collections of concrete objects, moving from cascades of them to mere large accumulations:

[my all-time favorite] Dealership Roof Collapse Ends In Massive Audi-valanche: The roof-top parking lot of an Audi dealership in the British city of Milton Keynes just completely caved in, sending approximately 20 cars crashing down into a mountain of cars below. (link)

Oh no! It’s a cow-valanche! What would your caption for this photo be? [photo of traffic sign warning of cows crashing down a mountainside] (link)

Cup Cake Cone’valanche [a pile of failed cupcake cones] (link)

Shoe-valanche! Victoria Beckham Donates 100 Pairs Of Shoes To Red Cross Charity Shop (link)

And on to more abstract referents:

BREAKING: AL-VALANCHE —- Franken WINS [election win for Al Franken] (link)

The Ron Paul-valanche [claimed groundswell of support for candidate Ron Paul] (link)

(Urban Dictionary has an entry for yarn-valanche, but the entry could just be playful inventiveness.)

Phonologically, the examples move from those in which their initial element is close to the /æ/ of avalanche — ash, ad, Al — and so might be viewed as simple portmanteaus, sharing some content between the two parts, on to those in which the initial element is phonologically distant from /æ/ — cow, shoe, Ron Paul, Cup Cake Cone — which suggests that –valanche is simply suffixed to this material. So: yet another libfix.