A comment from Victor Steinbok on my “Flagging Marcomentum” posting of yesterday, in which I noted a recent use of Marcomentum by Republican primary candidate Marco Rubio:

It’s a bit late to the party. X-mentum has been floating around for at least 6 years, much of it sarcastic (mitt-mentum four years ago).

To which I replied:

Well, I never said it was new; I said it was new to me. But then I’m very much not a fan of inside discussions of political campaigns.

That is, the -mentum libfix (which has not been reported in this blog) comes from a world I don’t know a lot about, but it turned up in more general reporting, so it was notable to me.

I was ignorant of the libfix. The question is whether I should have known about it; if so, then I should at least have apologized for my ignorance, and possibly I should now go back and delete the posting as of no significance to anyone but me.

Now I post out of ignorance all the time. In particular, I post about artists, composers, writers, performers, and the like — often of some considerable vintage, not just fresh and recently notable — who are unfamiliar to me, but still of interest to me. In almost all of these cases, the subjects of these postings have substantial followings, in which case a fan might add a comment that artist X, someone I just became aware of, is an old favorite of theirs. (They almost never say, “Well, you’re an ignorant cow, and you shouldn’t be taking up our time with something that everybody should know about.”)

Nobody can come close to knowing everything worth knowing; we’ll all be ignorant of a great many things, even though there are enthusiasts or specialists or people who are specially situated (say, who live in a place where the subject is something or someone of local significance) who know a good bit about the matter. In general, I figure that if I didn’t know about the matter, there are probably lots of other people in my readership who are similarly ignorant and would be happy to hear about it.

The same is true of linguistic usages. Nobody can be expected to know about the  practices of all communities of use, including all those distinguished by geography, sociocultural group, or purpose, so it’s often useful to post about details of, say, Australian English, AAVE, or business usage.

In the case at hand, I simply wasn’t into the language of political campaigning, so Marcomentum struck me as entertaining, especially as coming from the man himself. In this case, there turns out to be a nice discussion by a lexicographer of the popular and trendy, Mark Peters, writing on 7/27/15 on the commercial site Vocabulary.com (which comes with a free dictionary component):

Do you feel the Trump-mentum? (If so, please adjust your tinfoil hat.) Do you feel the Bernie-mentum? (I need to read more about Bernie Sanders to think of an appropriate joke.) Or are you playing it safe and enjoying a more centrist political force like Hillary-mentum or Jeb-mentum?

Whether you like or loathe it, I bet you’ve at least noticed the return of –mentum: a suffix that fills the Internet during election season much as a sulfurous smell fills hell. This suffix is also a terrific reminder of a sad truth: the media will never, ever treat a presidential election as anything more than a sporting event with fewer concussions.

While ­–mentum words fill Twitter—often as hashtags—they’re far from limited to the fringes of English. You can find plenty of such terms in the headlines too,

… Of course, there are synonyms for the common Bernie-mentum and Trump-mentum. My favorite alternative shows up in a Washington Post blog: “Another new Washington Post poll finds that The-Donald-Mentum is soaring among Republicans, but with a caveat…” If you don’t like Bernie-mentum, you can also call it Bern-mentum or Sanders-mentum. Of course, front runners Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush are represented by Hillary-mentum (or ­Hill-mentum) and Jeb Mentum (or Bush-mentum). And you can find a –mentum word for just about any candidate running. These terms include Marco-mentum, Kasich-mentum, and Chafee-mentum.

Mentum mania can be traced back to 2004, when presidential candidate Joe Lieberman made a groaner of a joke, referring to his Joementum. This coinage was so awful and perfect that it got a lot of attention, and soon –mentum found itself attached to anyone trolling for votes. The failure of Lieberman only added to the meaning of the suffix: -mentum is inherently a little untrustworthy. You have momentum now, but what does that really mean? It’s the nature of the endless election season for the wind to shift on a daily, and sometimes hourly, basis. Meaningful momentum is hard to find.

By the time I found Mark’s piece, I’d collected examples of, in no particular order:

Jeb-mentum, Trump-mentum, Bernie-mentum, Joe-mentum [referring to Joe Biden, not Joe Lieberman]

plus a non-political example of -mentum:

Mom-mentum: A 501(c)(3) non-profit organization providing leadership, education, and advocacy to support mothers in meeting today’s personal and professional challenges. (link)

Whatever else comes of this episode, I’ve gotten a new libfix out of it, one that might be only about 10 years old.

Today’s Zippy wanders across a surreal landscape, with at least two items of linguistic interest: the name of the character Premium Cruiseline (with its modifying noun premium) and the form poodle-napping (with the libfix -nap):

These ingredients, in order:

The name Premium Cruiseline. Bill Griffith is given to naming Dingburger characters after commercial products of all sorts. This time it’s socialite Premium Cruiseline, named after high-end cruise lines and ships. You can look, for example, at this Travel Weekly website with a list of premium cruise lines and ships, among them two especially notable items:

Cunard Line, founded in 1840 as a British trans-Atlantic steamship line – Mauretania, Lusitania, Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth — now offering the Queen Elizabeth 2 and Queen Victoria as well as a new Queen Mary 2

Holland America Line, formerly a Dutch shipping line and passenger line, 1873-1989, before becoming a cruise line

There are your basic cruiselines, and there are your premium cruiselines. And in fact, beyond that, your luxury cruiselines, some of them listed on a Cruise Critic website, “10 Best Luxury Cruise Ships”.

The modifier premium (and luxury). Among the uses of the noun premium in NOAD2 is one glossed:

a sum added to an ordinary price or charge: customers are reluctant to pay a premium for organic fruit.

with several specialized uses springing from this one, among them:

– a sum added to interest or wages; a bonus.

– [as modifier] relating to or denoting a commodity or product of superior quality and therefore a higher price: premium beers.

That is, premium beer and premium cruiseline (and premium underwear, which I’ll come to soon) are N + N compounds, with the first N functioning as a modifier of the second, head, N. The Oxford dictionaries, NOAD included, are inconsistent in how they treat such an item, sometimes labeling it as a noun (“as modifier”, as above), sometimes as an adjective (often, though not always when called for, labeled “attrib. only”, meaning used only as a prenominal modifier, not as a predicative). In fact, the latter treatment is the one NOAD2 gives to luxury, often a parallel to premium:

noun luxury an inessential, desirable item that is expensive or difficult to obtain: luxuries like raspberry vinegar and state-of-the-art CD players | he considers bananas a luxury.

adjective luxury luxurious or of the nature of a luxury: a luxury yacht | luxury goods.

(Note that the “adjective” luxury is in fact attributive-only and resists degree modification — *a very luxury yacht — so it’s not very adjective-like at all.)

As it happens, the basic – premium – luxury contrast in cruiselines has come up in this blog before, in regard to brands of men’s underwear. From a 11/28/15 posting “The revolution in men’s underwear”:

[The firm] Daily Jocks offers a number of lines of what have come to be called premium brands, emphasizing not just comfort but also style and sexiness, and in cost a step up from basic brands like Fruit of the Loom and Jockey. In fact, the world of men’s underwear has undergone a kind of revolution, from the days when 75% of men’s underwear purchases were made by women to the current scene, where only 25% are; men have become fashion-conscious and are shopping for themselves these days. Meanwhile, underwear modeling has gone from just a routine specialty in male modeling to a high-fashion specialty; men with good looks and hot bodies vie with one another for modeling jobs, and celebrities in sports and entertainment are courted by premium brands (for big bucks) to represent them in advertising.

Now the next stage: from premium brands to luxury brands. On to a wonderful piece by Guy Trebay in the NYT‘s Styles section on the 26th:  “As Personal as Luxury Gets: Men’s underwear goes premium, entering triple-figure territory” (head in print), “A Pair of Boxers for $400? Men’s Underwear Goes High-End “ (head on-line).

Poodle-napping. Then there’s the nominal gerund poodle-napping in the cartoon, a nominal use of the PRP form of a presumable verb poodle-nap, apparently formed by analogy to dog-nap, itself apparently formed by analogy to kidnap — or (another interpretation, one I now favor) we’re dealing with a libix –nap ‘to steal (s.th.) for the purpose of obtaining ransom’, liberated from kidnap at some point in the past (and now used in new formations like data-napping).

The full story has its entertaining moments. We start with the verb kidnap, from NOAD2:

take (someone) away illegally by force, typically to obtain a ransom. ORIGIN late 17th cent.: back-formation from kidnapper, from kid [‘child, young person’, referring to the typical victim of kidnapping] + slang nap ‘nab, seize’

The idea here is that this was a simple back-formation, like the back-formation of the verb edit from the noun editor; whether early users of kidnap appreciated that the element nap was itself a slang verb, later users surely didn’t; for them, kidnap was a unitary verb. But then, analogical formations like dognapping came along, and kidnap was open to reanalysis as kid + a theft verb nap, and the obsolete verb nap ‘nab’ got a new life as a libfix.

Wikipedia on dognapping the practice (which has been common for about a century) and dognapping the word, where the word is treated only in a nominal gerund use:

Dognapping is the crime of taking a dog from its owner with the intention of demanding a ransom. The word is derived from the term kidnapping. Historically in the United States, dogs had been stolen and sold on for medical research, but the introduction of the Animal Welfare Act of 1966 reduced these occurrences. The profit available to dognappers varies based upon the value of the dog or the amount that its original owners are willing to pay as ransom.

Dognapping is not a recent development, with reports of dogs being held by ransom since the 1930s. Harvard students kidnapped Yale’s mascot Handsome Dan II in March 1934, which was reported by the media as “dognapping”. By July of the same year, what was considered by the press to be Chicago’s first case of dognapping was solved with the return of a Boston Terrier named Kids Boot Ace, who had been missing for five months.

The first high-profile case of dognapping for monetary ransom occurred in 1948. The editor of House & Garden magazine, Richardson Wright, had a Pekingese puppy taken by a passing motorist who later telephoned to demand from him “as much money as you can pay” for the dog’s return. By 1952, gangs of dognappers were reported in the media.

But the nominal gerund dognapping and the agentive noun dognapper are not the only attested forms of a putative verb dognap; passive uses of the PSP are reasonably common as well (Reveille VI was dognapped, this man’s German shepherd was dognapped, owner wants to know if missing dog was dognapped, …), and there are attestations of finite forms as well (if someone dognaps  [PRS] / dognapped [PST] … ).

Then there are a respectable number of attestations of data napping / data-napping / datanapping, referring to ransomware that holds critical files hostage. (Obviously, these attestations are pretty recent, since the practice is pretty recent.) Again, the PRP as nominal gerund is by far the most frequently attested form, but others are also out there, including the PST, in things like if someone data napped your PC, …

In any case, it looks like -nap is yet another libfix, attached to a N stem to yield a theft-for-ransom V.

Today’s Zippy takes us to Billy’s Burg-O-Rama in Oxford MA.

(#1)

The strip is “about” politics (insofar as a Zippy is “about” anything), but this posting is about the libfix -((o/a)r)ama ‘display, spectacle, something really major’. And about food, starting with burgers (and clams and fish & chips).

The diner, a very small place (which gets mixed reviews):

(#2)

and its sign:

(#3)

Earlier on this blog:

from 9/10/09, “To the next level”: the playful libfix -((o)r)ama (that is -orama, -rama, -ama) and its history

from 2/15/10, “-orama-orama”: history and a collection of examples

The gloss ‘a display or spectacle’ is from Michael Quinion’s Affixes site on the element. In a number of its occurrences, it seems merely to refer to something (an event or an establishment, institution, or place) that is really big, really cool, or really significant.

Some of these, like Burg-O-Rama above, are food-related. For instance, Foodarama (with the -a- spelling variant rather than the etymological –o-, from the invention panorama):

Foodarama, also known as Cox’s Foodarama, is a supermarket chain in Texas, with its headquarters in Foodarama Store #1 in Brays Oaks, Houston. In Greater Houston, as of 2004 Foodarama operates nine stores. (link)

A commercial food establishment. Then a food event, the Beef-A-Rama in Minocqua WI, a  grilled beed cook-off;  the 52nd annual Beef-A-Rama in Minocqua is scheduled for September 23-24 of this year.

And a food preparation. From the Food Network’s program Guy’s Big Bite, with a recipe for Guido’s Lambo-Rama:

Guy Fieri makes lamb the Big Bite way: a whole Leg-O-Lamb, wrapped in bacon and served with aromatic Rosemary Au Jus. Black Eyed Basmati Salad, tossed in a honey-dijon vinaigrette, makes a primo side, and to end the meal with a bang, Guy’s busting out the flambee skills for his famous Texas French Toast Bananas Foster. (Episode: GI0815H)

Finally, an event that involves fish, but not directly as food: the Fish-O-Rama!, an annual fishing contest in Cedar Rapids IA, a benefit event for Boys & Girls Clubs of Cedar Rapids; the 14th Annual Fish-O-Rama! is set for August 6th and 7th of this year.

Start with my 3/31 posting “A kitten-killing God?”, where I looked at a slogan (and caption for an image), with the crucial part bold-faced:

Every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten. Please think of the kittens.

A formulaic pattern Please think of the Xs (with minor variants: Think of the Xs!, Won’t someone (please) think of the Xs?, Won’t anyone think of the Xs? What about the Xs?) — some sort of snowclone, call it Think Of The Xs, exhorting the addressee to stop some activity, on the grounds that it does some damage to the Xs or sets a bad example for the Xs. Nancy’s comment on this posting of mine:

Not wank-related, but “Catmageddon,” the new anti-smoking ad campaign from Truth, makes the following equation: “SMOKING = NO CATS = NO CAT VIDEOS.” Think of the cats!

Note: yet another instance of the disaster libfix –mageddon in Catmageddon:

(#1)

The ad campaign sends an anti-smoking message, reproducing, pretty much point by point, standard anti-smoking messages directed at parents, warning them of the dangers of second-hand smoke and the like for their children, but now transposed onto concern for people’s pet cats.

On to Think Of The Xs. There’s a Wikipedia page, full of useful stuff, but sort of a fruitcake assembled by various hands:

“Think of the children” (also “What about the children?”) is a phrase which evolved into a rhetorical tactic. Literally it refers to children’s rights (as in discussions of child labor). In debate, however, as a plea for pity, used as an appeal to emotion, it is a logical fallacy.

Art, Argument, and Advocacy (2002) argued that the appeal substitutes emotion for reason in debate. Ethicist Jack Marshall wrote in 2005 that the phrase’s popularity stems from its capacity to stunt rationality, particularly discourse on morals. “Think of the children” has been invoked by censorship proponents to shield children from perceived danger. Community, Space and Online Censorship (2009) noted that classifying children in an infantile manner, as innocents in need of protection, is a form of obsession over the concept of purity. A 2011 article in the Journal for Cultural Research observed that the phrase grew out of a moral panic.

It was an exhortation in the 1964 Walt Disney Pictures film Mary Poppins, when the character of Mrs. Banks pleaded with her departing nanny not to quit and to “think of the children!”. The phrase was popularized as a satiric reference on the animated television program The Simpsons in 1996, when character Helen Lovejoy pleaded “Won’t somebody please think of the children!” during a contentious debate by citizens of the fictional town of Springfield.

In the 2012 Georgia State University Law Review, Charles J. Ten Brink called Lovejoy’s use of “Think of the children” a successful parody. The appeal’s subsequent use in society was often the subject of mockery. After its popularization on The Simpsons, the phrase has been called “Lovejoy’s Law”, the “Helen Lovejoy defence”, the “Helen Lovejoy Syndrome”, and “think-of-the-children-ism”.

(#2)

So: plenty of appalling moral panic, over pornography, “bad / dirty language”, masturbation, public nudity, contraception, same-sex relationships, and more — one (perceived) drastic threat to children after another. Plus some well-grounded concern (over second-hand smoke, for example) but put in an odd context, and then some excellent satire.

Back to the 1940s. Ben Zimmer writes to report that going through back issues of American Speech, he came across a couple of articles discussing what we would now call “libfixes”; Harold Wentworth called them “neo-pseudo-suffixes”:

Harold Wentworth, “The Neo-Pseudo-Suffix ‘-eroo'”, American Speech, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Feb., 1942), pp. 10-15 (link)

Dwight L. Bolinger, “Among the New Words”, American Speech, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Dec., 1943), pp. 301-305 (link):

Long lists have been compiled of words formed out of what Harold Wentworth calls neo-pseudo-suffixes. ANW has commented on a number of these, including –cast, -burger, -legger, -aroo, and others. How deeply the habit of dissecting words in American English may be seen perhaps better, however, in those suffixes of which there are but a few scattered examples and which have yet to become popular. Herewith are listed a number of them, which also meet the condition of not being independent words used in some nonce-combination (such as busting or fest).

Only two items on the list have survived: from icicle, Popsicle; from photogenic, telegenic.

On Facebook, this came from Michael Palmer, who got it from Seth Andrew. (As with many such things, the creators of the image and the text are not identified.)

A penguin image altered to show a classic carnivore’s mouth, with its very prominent canine teeth. (In the real world, carnivores have such dentition, but then so do a number of herbivores. Evolution is complicated.)

Side benefit: the -ocalypse word penguinocalypse. The usual libfix is –pocalypse; this version is shortened to improve on the somewhat awkward penguinpocalypse (with its /n – p/ sequence).

One more item from my blog backlog, this one starting with a January 2nd op-ed column in the NYT by Paul Krugman, “America Becomes a Stan”, which began:

In 2015 the city of Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, was graced with a new public monument: a giant gold-plated sculpture portraying the country’s president on horseback. This may strike you as a bit excessive. But cults of personality are actually the norm in the “stans,” the Central Asian countries that emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union, all of which are ruled by strongmen who surround themselves with tiny cliques of wealthy crony capitalists.

Americans used to find the antics of these regimes, with their tinpot dictators, funny. But who’s laughing now?

We are, after all, about to [remember that this was published on January 2nd] hand over power to a man who has spent his whole adult life trying to build a cult of personality around himself; remember, his “charitable” foundation spent a lot of money buying a six-foot portrait of its founder. Meanwhile, one look at his Twitter account is enough to show that victory has done nothing to slake his thirst for ego gratification. So we can expect lots of self-aggrandizement once he’s in office. I don’t think it will go as far as gold-plated statues, but really, who knows?

I don’t mean to slight the social and political message here — that our country risks becoming a gold-plated failed-state autocracy — but this posting is mostly about the linguistic point, the appearance of the independent word stan, extracted from English names of regions and political entities with the libfix -(i/y)stan, originally an element in such names in other languages but now available for forming new names in English.

But first, a vision of what we could be, when America becomes great again:

(#1)

Turkmenistan has done it. Why can’t we?

The actual stans. The Central Asian stans Krugman is talking about are Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The term Central Asia often takes in Afghanistan as well (and some would argue that it should take in parts of Pakistan, and maybe some parts of Iran and Mongolia as well). A map from a previous posting:

(#2)

The suffix –stan in these names goes back to the Persian noun stan ‘place’, here conveying something like ‘place of (a people)’, cognate with the Sanskrit word sthāna. It occurs in some other names (Baluchistan, Kurdistan, Hindustan), originally in a variety of languages of the region (Indo-European and Turkic), and then in the names borrowed into English. Once these English names became familiar, the element –stan was ripe for being liberated as a suffix that could be used to form new words on any sort of base at all (but largely with a playful or mocking tone) — and it was also ripe for being fully liberated, treated as an independent word meaning something like ‘bush-league country’.

I’ll take the second of these developments first. An affix turning into an independent word isn’t  tremendously common, but it happens: we’ve gotten nouns like phobia (from the formative –phobia ‘fear, dislike’) and the pair pro ‘someone in favor of (something)’ and anti ‘someone opposed to (something)’ (from prefixes); and adjectives like hyper ‘hyperactive’ (from the prefix) and ish ‘sort of’ (from the suffix). There’s no standard term for this development. I would have preferred deaffixation: in affixation, an element (usually an independent word) goes into the affix state, in deaffixation, an element goes out of the affix state, to become an independent word. Unfortumately, deaffixation has also been used to refer to the suppression of an affix, by reduction or deletion.

So I’m inclined to look to the term libfix as a model. A libfix is a part of a lexeme elevated, liberated, to the status of an affix; we want a term for an affix elevated, liberated, to the status of a lexeme: I suggest liblex. For the inchoative verb corresponding to the verb libfixation, I suggest liblexification. Not especially elegant, but (I hope) serviceable.

The libfix -stan. At some point, -stan ran away from the relatively small set of names for regions and political entities, with ethnonym bases, to join the circus. So we get, for example:

Gary Larson’s Tee Time in Berzerkistan: A Doonesbury Book (2009)

a role-playing game, whose site includes the following text:

Greetings, Generals, for the past week we have watched as the government of Crazistan has rallied against our people and prepared its forces for a strike against us.

and, of course, a number of coinings of Turdistan (on the model of Kurdistan), including one on a site with this text:

The remote nation of Turdistan is the most undeveloped and poor in the world. The tiny Asian nation has, in recent years, come under attack from Russia, Iran, Iraq, America, Uzbekistan, a guy with a really big rock, a goldfish with a nasty attitude, and Poland.

The nation of Turdistan is widely known for not being known, and legendary for being a country in Asia. It boasts the world’s rustiest wheelbarrow, the world’s largest pothole, and the largest suicide rate in Asia. Its natural resources include shrubs, broken farm tools, and radioactive cabbages.

Even better, thanks to the sleuthing of Kim Darnell, I can report that there’s a Wikipedia page supplying a “List of fictional Asian countries”, among them:

Adjikistan: Central Asian nation located near Afghanistan and Pakistan in the video game SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs: Combined Assault

Albenistan: Central Asian country in the d20 adventures Raid on Ashkashem, the Qalashar Device, and the Khorforhan Gambit written by Fraser Ronald and published by Sword’s Edge Publishing.

Aldastan: Central Asian country, adjacent to Kazakhstan, in the Command & Conquer: Generals video game. Apparently a union of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzistan.

Babalstan: Middle Eastern country in the movie Harum Scarum

Bazookistan: A country that was visited by Scrooge McDuck to retrieve the Candy Striped Ruby from the Bazookistan Bandits.

Franistan: from the I Love Lucy episode ‘The Publicity Agent’ in which Lucy petends to be the “Maharincess of Franistan”, royalty from a faraway land who is a big fan of Ricky’s, in order to get Ricky some publicity.

Frigyzstan: another fictional union republic in the game Heavy Weapon, usually referring to Kyrgyzstan.

Hermajistan: A fictional nation used to replace Afghanistan in the anime version of Full Metal Panic. The change was made after the September 11, 2001 attacks, as the protagonist was originally raised in Afghanistan. A later part of the story involves an operation in Hermajistan.

Howduyustan: Carl Barks’ [Disney cartoonist] satirical version of India [from 1952].

Jumbostan and Unsteadystan: from the world of Donald Duck [Carl Barks again].

Kuristan: from the [1997] movie Mr. Magoo, Central Asian nation that is home to the famous jewel The Star of Kuristan.

Parmistan, the setting for the 1985 film Gymkata. It is said to be in the Hindu Kush mountain range.

Takistan: a country in Central Asia, from the computer game ArmA II: Operation Arrowhead.

Tazbekistan: Central Asian republic, setting for the 2013 BBC TV comedy series Ambassadors.

Turaqistan: A war torn Central Asian country in the movie War, Inc., occupied by a global defense corporation named Tamerlane. It is the country of Yonica Babyyeah, a famous Central Asian pop star.

Yetzanistan: Middle Eastern country from the animated television series Inspector Gadget

Yogistan: mountainous Asian country in The Ascent of Rum Doodle by William Ernest Bowman [a 1956 satire on the world of mountaineering literature].

Zokistan: a Middle East republic from RoboCop: The Animated Series, homeland of the sheikh Ilmar

As you can see, -(i/y)stan has been around for some time, with a tone ranging from gently mocking to wildly silly. Bazookistan is hard to beat.

The Edsel and Eleanor Ford House in Grosse Pointe Shores MI (which brings us a satisfying instance of the –palooza libfix); and the Castello di Amorosa near Calistoga CA (which offers a range of California wines and also Belgian-style chocolate). The first designed to reproduce the vernacular architecture of the English Cotswolds, the second a fantasy re-creation of an Italian castle.

Traditionally, the great estates of America, designed by and for captains of industry and commerce, had European models — castles and great country houses. They also functioned as art museums or had extensive formal gardens or both. Here in California, think Filoli in Woodside (on the San Francisco peninsula, not far north of where I live) and Hearst Castle in San Simeon (on the Central Coast).

The Edsel and Eleanor Ford house, built in the 1920s, is very much in this tradition, which continues to this day: Castello di Amorosa was built early in this century and opened to the public only 10 years ago.

The Ford estate came to me via Geoff Nathan on ADS-L a few days ago, who wrote about the Pollinator Palooza event there, coming up on the 19th (10-2): an instance of the –palooza libfix in a phonologically satisfying name (long, alliterative, with a nice rhythm).

(#1) 2016 event at Franklin Park in Columbus OH

Back in June Castello di Amorosa came to me from Juan Gomez, who visited it with friends and brought me a  raspberry dark chocolate bar from the shop there:

(#2) “Artisanally made by local gourmet chocolatier, Le Belge, exclusively for the Castello”

Pollinator Paloozas. On the playful libfix, see my 12/18/11 posting “Latkepalooza”, with a section on lollapalooza / lallapalooza, the source of the –palooza libfix.

Then on the event at the Ford house. From its site:

(#3) Monarch butterfly pollinating away

Mix and mingle with live butterflies in our butterfly house and learn about Monarch migrations.

Take a peek into a living bee hive and learn what makes them buzz from the experts at Greentoe Gardens.

Check out live bats from the Organization for Bat Conservation.

Learn about gardening for hummingbirds from Wild Birds Unlimited of Grosse Pointe Woods.

The corresponding event at the Franklin Park Conservatory has its own webpage, again featuring Monarchs:

(#4) Monarch on purple coneflower

There are even nurseries that specialize in plants for pollinators — in particular, Prairie Moon Nursery, Winona MN, with its Pollinator-Palooza Seed Mix:

Designed for full-sun to partial-shade sites with medium soils, this shortgrass mix boasts grasses and most wildflowers at 3′, with some flowers reaching 5′ at full bloom. Bloom times progress spring through fall. Our Pollinator-Palooza Seed Mix moves beyond more common pollinator mixes by offering plants that appeal to a broad array of pollinating insects. Included in the 45 species are some not commonly available like Late Figwort and Hairy Mountain Mint. Research shows that inclusion of native plantings near agricultural crops greatly enhances crop yield, attracts native pollinators, improves ecosystems and lessens reliance on already-stressed European-introduced honeybees that annually are transported around the country to flowering crops. Pollinator-Palooza’s blend of flowers and grasses will be equally appealing to humans and insects. We believe this mix will help enlighten everyone to the importance of pollinator habitat.

The Ford house. From Wikipedia, quite a bit from a long and detailed article on the estate:

(#5)

The Edsel and Eleanor Ford House is a mansion located at 1100 Lake Shore Drive in Grosse Pointe Shores, northeast of Detroit, Michigan; it stands on the site known as “Gaukler Point”, on the shore of Lake St. Clair. The house became the new residence of the Edsel and Eleanor Ford family in 1929. Edsel Ford was the son of Henry Ford and an executive at Ford Motor Company. The estate’s buildings were designed by architect Albert Kahn, its site plan and gardens by renowned landscape designer Jens Jensen. The property was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2016.

The Fords traveled to England with Albert Kahn for the concept’s ideas, where they were attracted to the vernacular architecture of the Cotswolds. They asked Kahn to design a house that would resemble the closely assembled village cottages typical of that rural region. Kahn’s design included sandstone exterior walls, a traditional slate roof with the stone shingles decreasing in size as they reach its peak, and moss with ivy grown across the house’s exterior. Construction on the house began in 1926.

While construction of the house itself took only one year, two years were spent fitting it with antique wood paneling and fireplaces brought from English Manor houses; interior fittings were in the hands of Charles Roberson, an expert in adapting old European paneling and fittings to American interiors. The Gallery, the largest room in the house, is paneled with sixteenth-century oak linenfold relief carved wood panelling. Its hooded chimneypiece is from Wollaston Hall in Worcestershire, England; the timber-framed house had been demolished in 1925 and its dismantled elements and fittings were in the process of being dispersed. Fourteenth century stained-glass window medallions were added to the house in the late 1930s. Roberson’s barrel-vaulted ceiling for the Gallery was modeled on one at Boughton Malherbe, Kent, England. Paneling and doors in the Dining Room, entirely devoid of electricity, came from ‘New Place’, a victim of early twentieth-century expansion in Upminster, a new suburb of London. The Library’s paneling and its stone chimneypiece came from the Brudenell seat, Deene Park, Northamptonshire, England. Harris suggests that this already once removed paneling had come from another ‘Brudenell seat.’ The Study has a wooden overmantel with the date 1585, from Heronden Hall, in Tenterden, Kent.

Other interesting design elements include kitchen counters made of sterling silver, a “secret” photographic darkroom behind a panel of Edsel Ford’s office, and Art Deco style rooms designed by Walter Dorwin Teague, a leading industrial designer of the 1930s. Teague’s first floor “Modern Room” features ‘the new’ indirect lighting method, taupe colored leather wall panels, and a curved niche with eighteen vertical mirrored sections. He also designed bedrooms and sitting rooms for all three of Edsel and Eleanor’s sons. Teague’s design for son Henry Ford II’s bathroom includes grey glass walls made of the same structural glass as its shower stall.

Furnishings: The house featured an extensive art collection, reflecting Edsel and Eleanor’s status as serious museum benefactors. After Eleanor Ford’s death, many important paintings were donated to the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA). Reproductions were hung in their place. The classical French-style Drawing Room features two original Paul Cézanne paintings and reproductions of Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas works. A reproduction of Vincent van Gogh’s The Postman Roulin hangs in the Morning Room. An original Diego Rivera painting, Cactus on the Plains, hangs in the Modern Room.

(On Rivera at the DIA, see my 6/15/15 posting “Rivera in Detroit”.)

There are also extensive gardens, where Pollinator Palooza will take place.

Castello di Amorosa. From Wikipedia:

(#6) Castle and vineyards

Castello di Amorosa is a castle and a winery located near Calistoga, California. First opening its doors to the public in April 2007, the castle is the pet project of 4th generation vintner, Dario Sattui, who also owns and operates the V. Sattui Winery named after his great-grandfather who originally established a winery in San Francisco in 1885 after emigrating from Italy to California.

The winery sits on property that was once part of an estate owned by Edward Turner Bale.

The castle interiors, which include 107 rooms on 8 levels above and below ground, cover approximately 121,000 square feet (11,200 m2). Key details and building techniques are architecturally faithful to the 12th and 13th century time period. Among many other features it has: a moat; a drawbridge; defensive towers; an interior courtyard; a torture chamber [an especially nice touch]; a chapel/church; a knights’ chamber; and a 72 by 30 feet (9.1 m) great hall with a 22-foot (6.7 m)-high coffered ceiling.

(#7) The great hall of the Castello

In addition to an assortment of wines, the Castello shop offers chocolate. Ad copy for the chocolate bar 4-pack:

Can’t decide which Castello chocolate bar is your favorite? Why not get all four! Enjoy our Dark Chocolate Sea Salt, Milk Chocolate, La Fantasia Raspberry Chocolate, and Key Lime Sea Salt White Chocolate bars in this enticing 4-pack.

The raspberry bar was quite tasty.

Today’s Zippy takes us through three commercial establishments with (variants) of –orama names, while fretting ambivalently about American patriotism:

(#1)

Wein-O-Rama (Cranston RI), Billy’s Burg-O-Rama (Oxford MA), and Liquorama (stores with that name in many locations), plus Zippy’s own coining, Shrink-O-Rama. As it happens, Bill Griffith has used the imagery in #1 for at least one other strip, which I posted on Language Log on 1/20/07:

(#2)

(That time, Zippy added Life-O-Rama in the third panel.)

The title of #1. A reference to Samuel Johnson’s assertion to James Boswell:

Patriotism [meaning: false or feigned patriotism, wielded as a weapon] is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

No doubt intended as by Bill Griffith as referring to current events in the United States.

The commercial establishments in #1. In the first panel:

(#3)

(#4)

(Photos from the Dinerville site.)

Wein-O-Rama not only has the libfix -orama, but it’s also a portmanteau of weiner (the Rhode Island spelling of wiener ‘hot dog’) and -orama, with an overlap in /ǝr/, yielding -ama as an apparent variant of -orama..

The competition among places offering Rhode Island weiners is substantial. Wein-O-Rama gets good reviews, but then so does the Olneyville N.Y. System chain; on Olneyville and the type of hot dogs it provides, see my 12/3/15 posting “Olneyville New York System” and the link in it.

In the second panel, Billy’s Burg-O-Rama in Oxford MA, the locale of a Zippy strip I looked at in a 4/9/16 posting “Zip-O-Rama”, on the playful libfix -((o/a)r)ama ‘display, spectacle, something really major’, with more examples.

In the third panel, a Liquorama store, which one I haven’t been able to determine.

Postings on -orama.

the 1/20/07 Language Log posting (above)

a 9/10/09 posting “To the next level” (link)

a 2/15/10 posting “orama-orama” (link)

a 11/18/10 posting “Data points: Playful libfixes 1/18/10” (link)

the 12/3/15 posting on Olneyville (above)

Into the chasm between Penguin Awareness Day (January 20th) and Groundhog Day (February 2nd) springs this warning cry on Doctor Anna’s Imaginarium page on Facebook:

Wake up sheeple! The penguins are coming!

A bonus is the occurrence of the disaster libfix -(po)calypse in penguinocalypse. Voracity, tenacity, penguinocalypse.

(There will be plain talk of men’s bodies and mansex, so not for kids or the sexually modest. On the other hand, there’s a lot of playfulness.)

A brief routine from the Firesign Theatre, the fourth track on their compendium album Dear Friends (2001); you can listen to it here. The album has routines from the comedy troupe’s radio shows — highly improvisatory, veering in odd directions in a virtual haze of pot smoke.

It started with some Dick Danger gay porn, which led to the Firesign Theatre and their “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye”, which took me to the cock-tease bit. That then took me to more gay porn, Raging Stallion’s 2013 Cock Tease, and to uses of cock tease / cock-tease / cocktease in general and on this blog.

So it starts with my 3/9/18 posting “The further adventures of Dick Danger”, with a title taking off on FT’s “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye” (itself a take-off on the Sam Spade private dick novels, with infusions from other sources, including the Beatles’ song “Rocky Raccoon”).

Exchanges with a friend about sexual content in FT’s sketches — some gay-tinged, but in my estimation, neither celebrating nor dissing queers, instead designed  to discomfit queer-wary straight guys — led me from FT’s character Rocky Rococo to Roosterama. Note: Roosterama is a FT invention. (Fosters Freeze in the sketch “Freezing Mr. Foster” is, on the other hand, a genuine soft-serve ice cream restaurant in California.)

The beginning of the sketch list on Dear Friends:

Toad Away [a play on towed away]; Sodom And Jubilee [snark on religiosity]; Freezing Mr. Foster; I Was A Cock-Teaser for Roosterama!; Deputy Dan Has No Friends [outrageous children’s book in Spanish translated for the audience]; …

The cock-teaser sketch begins, from out of the blue:

I came out of twelve years of college and I didn’t even know how to sew. All I could do was account [with a degree in accountancy, presumably].

He couldn’t even account for himself. This leads somehow to chicken-clucking noises and so to cock-teasing at Roosterama (the speaker boasts that he enraged bantams), and then to bear-baiting (unsubtle allusion to masturbating), then bear-hating, and on to the unpleasant habits of untamable bears.

The ideas tumble past in free association, fresh ones every few seconds.

We can only speculate about what all goes on at Roosterama, with its name incorporating the libfix -((o/a)r)ama ‘display, spectacle, something really major’ — except that teasing cocks and enraging bantams, flagrantly, are on the menu.

In the sketch, it’s a man who teases cocks at Roosterama, so the actions are heavily gay-tinged. In a gay context, there are at least three relevant senses of cock-teasing:

teasing (playing with) one’s cock (especially by sticking a hand in one’s pants and masturbating, especially for an audience)

edging (teasing a man’s cock by stimulation, but withholding the release of ejaculation); see this posting of 3/8/13

teasing with one’s cock (arousing men through bodily display)

There are written descriptions, still photos, and videos showing all three activities; the third is the primary usage on this blog (there is a cock tease Page here). From my 3/7/13 posting “cock tease”:

Some models [for male photography] who avoid dick shots nevertheless happily pose for shots in which their dicks are ostentatiously concealed (by a hand or some object) and shots in which they flagrantly display themselves just short of exposing the root of the penis; these are two types of what I’ll call cock tease shots, in which the homoerotic undercurrents of nude male photography are elevated to central aspects of the pictures.

In such performances, actual cocks are withheld. But even when cocks are revealed — by male strippers or dancers, for example, performing for women or for gay men — they are still withheld from the audience, in the sense that they usually aren’t made available for sexual acts with members of the audience; the cocks excite admiration, arousal, orgasm, but without physical contact. (There are gay sex clubs with strippers or dancers who go on to offer their dicks for stroking and sucking by spectators. Even there, the performers must necessarily withhold their cum for all but a few spectators; they can manage only so many shots in a show.)

The overriding theme is display combined with withholding: withholding the cock from view, withholding contact with the cock, withholding cum.

The full spectrum of performances is on view in the 2013 Raging Stallion gay porn flick Cock Tease. The cover photo on the DVD and the studio’s ad copy are both available in today’s AZBlogX posting “Raging Sallion’s cock tease”. A dickless version of the cover (in two parts) and the beginning of the ad copy:

(#1) Brayden Forrester, Caleb Colton, Mitchell Rock

(#2) Killian acts in one scene; on the pornstar, see the XBlog posting

Director Adam Killian wraps up his Monster Bang Cock Trilogy with Cock Tease. It may be the hardest 150 minutes of your life. Tattered clothing exposing all the best parts is the common denominator of these scenes, and it starts the tease. It both reveals and conceals, freeing your imagination to choose between the hidden flesh and the exposed. It’s all hard, and sweaty enough to make you dizzy, and then Adam Killian choses some of the biggest dicks he can find to really get you teased into a jack off frenzy.

The promise of the cock-teasing is rapidly fulfilled, with four scenes packed with mansex and spurting cum. Involving Jesse Santana, Trenton Ducati, and Jake Genesis as well as Killian and the three men on the cover.

A cock-tease p.r. shot of Mitchell Rock for the flick:

(#3) Torn jeans, jutting dick in red briefs, and a shirt-lifting display as well

Cock-teaser and strip-teaser. In OED2. Cock-teaser (which the OED has only for reference to a woman) seems to have been attested first, but strip-teaser and strip-tease (which the OED treats as potentially gender-neutral, and NOAD treats explicitly as gender-neutral) seem to have gained wide currency first (through Variety).

cock-teaser  n. coarse slang a sexually provocative woman who evades or refuses intercourse. [1st cite 1891, in Farmer & Henley’s slang dictionary]

cock-tease n. coarse slang [with the same meaning, and now the preferred variant] [1st cite 1957]

cock-teasing adj. [1st cite 1968]

noun strip-teaser: orig. U.S.  A performer of strip-tease; an ecdysiast or stripper. [1st cite 1930, in Variety]

noun strip-tease: Etymology: Back-formation < strip-teaser. colloq. (orig. U.S.). A kind of entertainment in which a female (occasionally a male) performer undresses gradually in a tantalizingly erotic fashion before an audience, usually to music; an instance of this. [1st cites in Variety, in the 1930s]

From NOAD:

noun cocktease: vulgar slang a woman who leads a man to the mistaken belief that she is likely to have sexual intercourse with him. [GDoS on cockteaser / cocktease: ‘a woman (or man, if gay) who permits or encourages a good deal of sexual intimacy but not intercourse’; gay cites appear in the 1960s and 70s]

noun striptease: a form of entertainment in which a performer gradually undresses to music in a way intended to be sexually exciting.

noun ecdysiast: humorous a striptease performer. ORIGIN 1940s: from Greek ekdusis ‘shedding’, on the pattern of enthusiast.

Sadly, the noun ecdysiasm seems to be used only as a medical term referring to a compulsion to undress in order to produce sexual desire in others. Which should be known as pornstar’s disorder, I suppose.

A follow-up to my posting of the 28th, “Deviant Last Suppers”, about queer travesties of Leonardo’s Last Supper, a painting of the communal meal (celebrated on Maundy Thursday, yesterday this year) that Christians understand as the origin of the eucharist, or communion, ritual (take, eat, this is my body; take, drink, this is my blood). Now after sunset today, the Jewish ritual communal meal, the Passover seder, with its symbolic retelling of the Jews’ liberation from slavery in ancient Egypt. So, Bill Stewart wondered in a comment on this blog, what about a queer seder?

Well, sort of.

From Wikipedia on the seder:

The Passover Seder (Hebrew: סֵדֶר ‘order, arrangement’; Yiddish: סדר‎ seyder) is a Jewish ritual feast that marks the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Passover.

… The Seder is a ritual performed by a community or by multiple generations of a family, involving a retelling of the story of the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in ancient Egypt. This story is in the Book of Exodus (Shemot) in The Hebrew Bible. The Seder itself is based on the Biblical verse commanding Jews to retell the story of the Exodus from Egypt

… Traditionally, families and friends gather in the evening to read the text of the Haggadah, an ancient work derived from the Mishnah … The Haggadah contains the narrative of the Israelite exodus from Egypt, special blessings and rituals, commentaries from the Talmud, and special Passover songs.

Seder customs include telling the story, discussing the story, drinking four cups of wine, eating [matzo (unleavened bread)], partaking of symbolic foods placed on the Passover Seder Plate, and reclining in celebration of freedom.

Both the Haggadah text and the parts of the meal are prescribed by custom. On the ritual of the meal, see my 4/3/15 posting “Lamb ham and the seder plate”. On the text, from Wikipedia:

The Haggadah (Hebrew “telling”; plural: Haggadot) is a Jewish text that sets forth the order of the Passover Seder. Reading the Haggadah at the Seder table is a fulfillment of the Scriptural commandment to each Jew to “tell your son” of the Jewish liberation from slavery in Egypt as described in the Book of Exodus in the Torah (“And thou shalt tell thy son in that day, saying: It is because of that which the LORD did for me when I came forth out of Egypt.” Ex. 13:8).

… Reform Judaism holds that there are no normative texts, and allowed individuals to create their own haggadahs. Reform Jews take pride in their community’s resumption of liturgical creativity outside a halakhic framework; although the significant differences they introduced make their texts incompatible with Jews who wish to follow a seder according to Jewish tradition.

Let’s regroup.

The Last Supper in the Christian bible. From 1 Corinthians 11 (KJV):

23 For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, That the Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed [by Judas Iscariot] took bread: 24 And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me. 25 After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me. 26 For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come.

This becomes the ritual of the eucharist, a church rite conducted by a priest. With its offers of the body and blood, it lends itself to gay carnal travesties (the penis as the body, semen as symbolic blood, the substance of life), and the celebrants worshiping on their knees can easily be folded into the sexual scene.

The seder is quite different in tone. It’s a cultural observance (of Jewish identity) as well as a religious ritual; it’s a meal (heavily symbolic, but with real food); and it’s conducted among family and friends at home (not in a house of worship), without the authority of a rabbi. Not so easily made sacrilegiously carnal — the cerenony is serious, but warm and homey, like Thanksgiving celebrated according to a formula thousands of years old — though Bill Stewart mused about how to find the afikoman and what the prize is for finding it.

From Wikipedia:

Afikoman (Hebrew: אֲפִיקוֹמָן, based on Greek epikomon[ἐπὶ κῶμον] or epikomion[ἐπικώμιον], meaning “that which comes after” or “dessert”) is a half-piece of matzo which is broken in two during the early stages of the Passover Seder and set aside to be eaten as a dessert after the meal.

Based on the Mishnah in Pesahim 119b, the afikoman is a substitute for the Passover sacrifice, which was the last thing eaten at the Passover Seder during the eras of the First and Second Temples and during the period of the Tabernacle. The Talmud states that it is forbidden to have any other food after the afikoman, so that the taste of the matzo that was eaten after the meal remains in the participants’ mouths. Since the destruction of the Temple and the discontinuation of the Korban Pesach, Jews eat a piece of matzo now known as afikomen to finish the Passover Seder meal.

Customs around the afikoman vary, though they often share the common purpose of keeping children awake and alert during the Seder until the afikoman is eaten. Following Ashkenazi customs, the head of household may hide the afikoman for the children to find, or alternatively, the children may steal the afikoman and ransom it back.

I suppose this could be made into a booty search, but I see no evidence tht anyone’s done it.

What has been done, at least in Reform Judaism, is the creation of lgbt Haggadot, which put queer spins on the traditional Haggadah. There are sites for making your own Haggadah. One big one crows:

Let’s Make Your Passover Haggadah Together

Our simple platform allows you to create a custom Passover Seder, with access to unique content contributed by our community. Find readings, artwork and video clips in our library, to enliven your Seder experience. Join our 37,000 users and create your own free Haggadah this Passover.

There you can find the GLBT Seder Plate from JQ International:

(#1)

The JQ GLBT seder plate includes some special symbolic items including:

An Orange which carries the seeds of rebirth and represents the diversity of the Jewish community as we increase inclusion.

A Coconut for the LGBT still in the closet and their struggle in coming out

Sour Vegetables for the flavor of hatred and bigotry

Fruit Salad for our collective potential and recognition

Flowers, Sticks and Stones for the path all of us as LGBT and Allies are on as we move through life and play our role in the development of our culture and commemoration of our history.

The Exodus story is easily transformed into a coming-out narrative. And from the Davidson College Hillel site:

The ritual of breaking the middle matzah has become a time in seders today, to break social structures excluding the LGBTQ community as well as other marginal groups, because by breaking the matzah, we create space to include all

And so on. You can tailor a full Haggadah for your queer purposes (at least if you’re Reform; other Jews have to stick very close to the traditional wording).

Custom-made Haggadahs are sometimes moving, sometimes embarrassingly earnest, occasionally silly. (It’s a bit like writing your own wedding vows; I have a friend who maintains that some people should absolutely be prevented from doing that.) But, as Bill Stewart noted to me, they’re demure, not salacious.

On the other hand, what you do before Passover is entirely open for play. An opportunity that, at least in NYC, has been fully utilized. From the Logo site on 4/3/15, “As The Manischewitz Flows, Gay Jewish Boys Passover Pre-Party At Sederlicious” by Dan Avery:

(#2) Yes, Sederlicious and Hebro: playful libfix and brocabulary (the puns, plus the play on Let my people go!)

Nearly 500 gay Jews and their friends hit Sederlicious, Hebro’s annual pre-Passover party Saturday night at Manhattan’s Hudson Terrace.

As DJ Steven Sidewalk manned the booth, everyone got down with hosts Adam Werner and Omar Sharif, Hebro founder Jayson Littman and go-go boys dressed like pharaohs.

“The Jewish community is one that wants to get to know each other — I don’t look at it as self-segregation, I look at it as bringing more people together. There are a lot of non-Jews that come to our parties. We call them ‘bagel chasers.’”  [Note the X chaser snowclonelet, and the bagel as symbol of Jewishness, and possibly the anus as well.] Littman told Next magazine. “Passover is a time when people come home. It’s akin to Thanksgiving — all the mothers are going to ask, ‘Have you met a husband?’

Littman schedules Sederlicious the weekend before Passover, “with hopes that these boys will be able to find a boy to bring home to Seder.”

Two celebrants from 2015:

(#3) Timoteo meets the Star of David, and finds his pharaoh

And the invitation for this year’s event (last Saturday), on the Hebro site:

Join over 500 gay Jews as we party the night away as if we just left Egypt yesterday!

Find a boy to bring home for seder and enjoy this night before you spend a week ordering your bacon cheeseburgers without the bun!

(Little gay Jewish joke. A bacon cheeseburger is as treif, as non-kosher, as could be, on any day of the year, so tossing the bun — leavened bread! — would hardly be enough to honor Passover, but if you crave some meat (maybe with a whiff of cheese), you pig, …)

Carnal and sweet at the same time. Hot go-go boys and (maybe) a guy to bring home to Mama.

By day it looks like this:

(#1) The washateria ( = laundromat) at 37th and Guadalupe in Austin TX

But UT linguistics professor Steve Wechsler reports that at night, thanks to a defect in the lighting, it looks like this:

(#2) The Austin shateria: shat + the -eria variant of the libfix -((e)t)eria ‘commercial establishment selling X or offering Xing as a service’

I get two possible interpretations, both risible: either the base X is shat, one of the possible PST/PSPs of the verb shit (so that a shateria sells shit as a product or offers shitting as a service); or it’s Shat, a nickname for the actor William Shatner (so that a Shateria sells Shatneriana or offers Shatner’s professional services as an actor, writer, producer, director, or huckster).

The libfix. Although the libfix was first reported as -((e)t)eria, playfully named Austin laundromats seem mostly to be washaterias, with an a rather than an e in the spelling of /ǝ/ in the second syllable, and indeed washateria seems to be the dominant spelling these days.

For some background on the playful libfix, see the -((e)t)eria section of Zwicky & Pullum on plain and expressive morphology (Berkeley Linguistics Society, 1987). The Google Ngram for washeteria / washateria shows both spellings attested throughout the history of the playful formation, but with a general preference for washateria, presumably a reflection of a favoring of a spellings for /ǝ/ in words perceived to be from the Anglo-Saxon stratum of the English vocabulary:

(#3) washeteria / washateria through 2008

The inflectional forms of the verb shit. There are three widely attested PST/PSPs of this verb (all listed in dictionaries, in particular NOAD): the completely regular shitted (compare pitted for the verb pit); the PST/PSP = BSE variant shit (compare hit for the verb hit); and the ablaut PST/PSP variant shat (compare sat for the verb sit). If I recall correctly, the second (in, say, The cat shit on my pillow this morning) is by far the most frequent, but the last is available for interpreting shateria < washateria.

William Shatner. I don’t know if he’s ever been nicknamed Shat (parallel to my being nicknamed Zwick, which has certainly happened), but at least some people who saw Steve Wechsler’s Facebook posting of #2 got that interpretation for shateria. From Wikipedia:

William Shatner (born March 22, 1931) is a Canadian actor, author, producer, and director. In his seven decades of television, Shatner became a cultural icon for his portrayal of James T. Kirk, captain of the USS Enterprise, in the Star Trek franchise.

(#4) Shatner in Star Trek

(#5) Shatner just before his 87th birthday

Jon Lighter to ADS-L on the 19th:

CNN describes Anthony Bourdain’s recent hearty, he-man adventure in Newfoundland as “brotastic.”

Jon seems to have found the word notable, but then he probably doesn’t hang out with people who use it. I don’t either, but then I have a side interest in brocabulary, enough so that there’s a brocabulary Page on this blog, with links to earlier postings. In any case, I haven’t posted about it before, so a few notes.

The formative bro has a number of uses as an independent word, originally as a free-standing noun; then verbed in expressions like bro it up and bro down; and in compound Ns — as first element in things like brolovers, as second in things like gaybros. But it has truly flourished in playful portmanteaus, some just one-shot jokes (brotato chip), some serving as labels for referents of some significance in the world of bros (bromance).

Formally, the portmanteaus are of two types:

those where some part of bro is shared with the initial part of the the word it combines with: brocabulary, bromance, brotato chip, brojob, bromosexual,…

those where bro replaces phonologically distant material in the initial part of the word it combines with: bro-toon, brostravanganza, (possibly) bromanteau, (apparently) brotastic

The phonological distance between bro and the fan of fantastic would appear to be a strike against brotastic. But –tastic has a rich life of its own as a morphological formative, a libfix, so that brotastic can be seen as the combination of the independent element  bro with suffixal –tastic, rather than as any kind of portmanteau.

The story of –tastic is told in my 1/20/15 posting “Once -tastic, now -astic”, with an inventory of –tastic examples (mostly from Grant Barrett), among them fun-tastic (1939-42), shoe-tastic (1966), swim-tastic (1970), and much more recent cocktastic, dicktastic, bangtastic (plus, not in that posting, fucktastic). (Earlier examples tend to the commercial, more recent ones to the sexual.)

In any case brotastic has been around at least since 2007, in:

What “Bro-tastic” activities were you involved in today?

(where the hyphen and the surrounding quotes both suggest that the writer saw the word as a recent invention).

Then in 2008, “Little Italy’s Bro-Tastic Hero” and in 2012, “The 8 Most Bro-Tastic Bands of All Time”.

Examples of brotastic are closely associated with the activities and interests of bros (especially young ones) and those who share some of their enthusiasms and attitudes (like Anthony Bourdain). So we get the YouTube channel Brotastic Trick Shots, which advertises:

Welcome to Brotastic! On this channel, you will see amazing Frisbee and basketball [and soccer and ping pong] trick shots! If you like what you see in this video, we recommend that you subscribe so that you won’t miss our next awesome shot!

(awesome and brotastic are natural companions.)

And the Brotastic Nerdom site — a bro nerd kingdom:

(#1)

And a gaming site that’s posted this review:

(#2)

At its core, Broforce is a run and gun platformer; but it is so more than just that. The game pays homage to 80’s and 90’s action movies where a hero would rack up an immense body count, dishing out the pain to all that would stand in his way. The game delivers humorous wordplay, a massive amount of carnage and dozens of Bro’s to play with.

brotastic seems to belong mostly to that segment of bro culture where young guys are looking for dozens of bros to play with, in gaming, sports enthusiasms, and nerdish pursuits. Not Jon Lighter’s world, or mine.

(Homowear: male models in underwear, displaying their bodies homoerotically, with archly queer ad copy. Not X-rated, but not to everyone’s taste.)

The Daily Jocks ad for PUMP! underwear from the 15th:

(#1)

Underwear model as sculptural form. Mahogany Man.

The ad copy:

A creamy style with a tangy twist, the Creamsicle Access Trunk is everyone’s favorite flavor.

The comfort waistband offers a secure fit for the soft touch micro-mesh in the front and open, backless design in the rear.

A cut built for confidence, the Creamsicle Access Trunk features a supportive cup with a nearly naked feel, plus retro styling that adds a bold and playful touch for when you’re (un)dressed to impress.

Creamsicles. Creamsicle in the name is an allusion to the frozen treat with the brand name Creamsicle. From the Wikipedia article on Popsicles:

A Popsicle is a Good Humor-Breyers brand of ice pop consisting of flavored, colored ice on a stick.

In 1905 in Oakland, California, 11-year-old Francis William “Frank” Epperson was mixing a powdered flavoring for soft drinks with water. He accidentally left it on the back porch overnight, with a stirring stick still in it. That night, the temperature dropped below freezing, and the next morning, Epperson discovered the drink had frozen to the stick, inspiring the idea of a fruit-flavored ‘Popsicle’ [pop as in lollipop, –sicle as in icicle; following on this terminological innovation, –sicle has become a libfix of wide application].

In 1922, he introduced the creation at a fireman’s ball, where according to reports it was “a sensation”. In 1923, Epperson began selling the frozen pops to the public at Neptune Beach, an amusement park in Alameda, California. By 1924 Epperson had received a patent for his “frozen confectionery” which he called “the Epsicle ice pop” He renamed it to Popsicle, allegedly at the insistence of his children. Popsicles were originally sold in fruity flavors and marketed as a “frozen drink on a stick.”

… The Popsicle brand began expanding from its original flavors after being purchased by Unilever in 1989. Under the Popsicle brand, Unilever holds the trademark for both Creamsicle and Fudgsicle. Creamsicle’s center is vanilla ice cream, covered by a layer of flavored ice. Creamsicle flavors include orange, blue raspberry, lime, grape, cherry and blueberry. [The prototypical Creamsicle is orange-flavored (and -colored).] Fudgsicles are flat, frozen desserts that come on a stick and are chocolate-flavored with a texture somewhat similar to ice cream.

Classic (orange-flavored) Creamsicles:

(#2)

(The racily backless underwear in #1 is of course colored orange (and gray and white).)

And Fudgsicles, in their package:

(#3)

(Other companies make coated ice cream bars in various flavors, especially orange, under other names: Nestlé’s Orange & Cream Bars, Hood’s Orange Cream Bars, and Pillsbury’s Orangesicles, for example.)

(Popsicles, like lollipops, are classic phallic symbols.)

On the PUMP! company. From my 11/9/15 posting “PUMP! Boys and Trojans”, which has 5 mages from PUMP! underwear ads:

PUMP! specializes in gym-oriented images (pumping iron and all that), though they also have a few pretty-boy models and a lot of models doing the slutty rentboy look

And on pumping it up. Start with NOAD on some verbings of the noun pump:

verb pump: 1 [a] [with adverbial of direction] force (liquid, gas, etc.) to move in a specified direction by or as if by means of a pump: the blood is pumped around the body | [no object]:  if we pump long enough, we should bring the level up. [b] [no object, with adverbial of direction] move in spurts as though driven by a pump: blood was pumping from a wound in his shoulder. 2 [a] fill (something such as a tire or balloon) with liquid or gas using a pump: I fetched the bike and pumped up the back tire | my veins had been pumped full of glucose. [b] informal shoot (bullets) into (a target). 3 [a] move vigorously up and down: [with object]: we had to pump the handle like mad | [no object]: that’s superb running — look at his legs pumping. [b] apply and release (a brake pedal or lever) several times in quick succession, typically to prevent skidding. [c] Baseball move one’s arm as if throwing a ball held in the hand, but without releasing the ball: [in combination]:  behind the plate Howard double-pumped, then threw to second.

[idiomatic] phrasal verb pump something up: informal [a] increase: she needs to read and pump up her political grip. [b] turn up the volume of (music): let’s pump up those tunes, man. [c] give inappropriate support and encouragement to: we let them pump up our egos.

GDoS has more detail on the slang idiom:

verb pump up: 1 to exaggerate [cites from 1977, 1999] 2 (US black/campus) to make livelier, to fill with energy [cites from 1991, 2001] 3 to lift weghts, to bodybuild [cite from 1994]

adj. pumped (up) [< pump up]: 1 (US) excited, full of something, usu. oneself [1971 Current Sl. VI:8: Pumped. adj. Excited. 1991 (con. 1920s) O.D. Brooks Legs 90: The thought of running a pool room by myself  three hours a day, seven days a week, had me so pumped up hardly slept. 1992 J. Mowry Way Past Cool 265: Crack was intense, but cruelly quick. On top, where the boy had been a minute ago, you were pumped to the max. 2007 T. Dorsey Hurricane Punch 4: Can’t tell how glad I am it’s hurricane season again. I’m so pumped!

Mahogany Man in #1 is pumped up (enlarged) by bodybuilding, and the photo aims to pump the viewer up, to get the viewer pumped (up), to excite the viewer. That’s what PUMP! does.

Two more items from PUMP!’s recent product lines, including another Access item (backless, to provide easy access to the wearer’s ass):

(#4) “The PUMP! All-Access Trunk fits like a typical boxer brief, except the backless rear brings the playfulness, freedom, and added sexiness of the Jockstrap. This truly is a new style underwear that is guaranteed to heat things up, for whatever the occasion.”

(#5) “For the ultimate in comfort and style, opt for the Academy Free-Fit Boxer. The snug and supportive fit keep everything exactly where it should be, while the soft touch micro-mesh makes for a barely there feel. With its classic red, white and blue color combo, the Academy Free-Fit Boxer is truly the perfect pair — no matter what the day (or night!) holds.”

This steamy photo adds two elements to the crotch focus of the underwear: the pitsntits presentation (with shaved pits) and a central preoccupation with the  model’s pumped abs. Plus that face.

Another abs-obsessed ad from Daily Jocks, back in September, for sportswear from the Spanish company Code 22, here with shirt-lifting rather than pitsntits:

(#6)

And with a different, but equally intense, facial expression. Top to bottom: face, abs, crotch. Framed by sinewy arms.

[Added a bit later: there is now a Page on this blog with an inventory of shirt-lifting postings.]

(Minimal linguistic content. But it’s certainly seasonal.)

I have an admitted fondness for cheesy shark movies (which is almost all shark movies). But I don’t think I’ve been sufficiently clear about my distaste for almost all Christmas movies; I have a low tolerance for sentimentality. I recently re-watched Love Actually as an exercise in MST3K-style snark, which entertained me, but still left me sad that so many accomplished and engaging actors should have become enmeshed in the thing. (Yes, I know, the movie is wildly popular.)

The seasonal-sentiment component of today’s Christmas movie, Santa Jaws (a 2018 release on the Syfy Channel), is relatively small, and its preposterous-premise component is extraordinarily high (better to read the plot summary first, to get your guffaws out of the way ahead of time), but then cheesy shark movies as a genre have preposterous premises and incredible plots, so I can tell you that within the constraints of the genre this flick is well-done, with nice performances from the cast.

(#1)

The IMDb summary is hard to read with a straight face, and it barely scratches the surface of the film’s weirdness:

Santa Jaws (2018): Trying to survive the family Christmas, Cody makes a wish to be alone, which ends up backfiring when a shark manifests and kills his entire family. Director: Misty Talley. Writer: Jake Kiernan. Stars: Reid Miller, Courtney Lauren Cummings, Jim Klock.

From the Bloody Disgusting site, “[Review] We Watched ‘Santa Jaws’ and It Was Better Than Most Syfy Shark Movies” by Chris Coffel on 8/15/18:

I’ve watched a lot of Christmas horror movies in my day. I’ve watched a lot of shark movies too, so when I heard that a movie called Santa Jaws was premiering on SyFy, well, I was obligated to tune in. Now I love Christmas horror and shark films, and there are some great titles from both of those categories, however, there’s also a lot of bottom of the barrel schlock to be found. That’s all to say that when I sat down to watch this mashup of the two I tried to do so with zero expectations — which, if I’m being honest, is hard to do with a movie called Santa Jaws.

Cody, played by Reid Miller[,] who looks an awful lot like Edward Furlong circa 1991, is your typical teenage comic book fan. He and his best friend Steve (Hawn Tran) have created a new comic called Santa Jaws just in time for the holiday season. The film opens with the two sharing the new book with their local comic book guy, Clark (Scott Allen Perry), as they prepare for the comic book store’s big Christmas Eve party. In a move that we can all relate to, Cody is dreading having to spend any holiday time with his family and is using this comic party as his escape.

Unfortunately, the day before the big party Cody’s mom gets a call from the school principal. It seems as if Cody drew an offensive drawing portraying the principal in an unfavorable manner and shared it on social media. Cody gets grounded for a week and that means no Christmas Eve part at the comic book store. Rats.

Before going to bed that night Cody makes some new Santa Jaws sketches using a pen he received from his grandpa as a gift. While drawing he wishes he were alone for Christmas and well, that turns out to be a not-so-great idea. The pen, it’s magic, [the initial preposterous premise: a magic pen] and it brings Santa Jaws to life [complete with Santa cap on its dorsal fin]. And the living, breathing Santa Jaws only has one goal — to kill Cody’s family [more pen magic — plus, the creature is roused to attack by the trappings of Christmas, so it savages several of Cody’s friends as well as family members]. Cody teams with Steve, his older brother Josh (Arthur Marroquin) and the cute girl (Courtney Lauren Cummings) that just moved in next door to defeat Santa Jaws and save the family.

(#2) Santa Jaws swimming in for a kill

… Fun fact: Santa Jaws was directed by Misty Talley, the director behind Shark Island, Ozark Sharks and Mississippi River Sharks. [I confess to having seen all three.]

The teenaged characters are especially nicely drawn.

Santa Jaws was preceded on Syfy by Snowmageddon (a magic snowglobe envelopes a town in disasters) and followed by Christmas Icetastrophe (a comet brings frosty meteorological disaster — at Christmas!)

(Ok, a tiny bit of linguistic interest: the libfixes -mageddon and -tastrophe, both stalwart formatives on Syfy, where there’s always disaster on tap.)

A few days ago, this full-page magazine display made the rounds of Facebook:

(#1) Deriding the “Libtard Agenda” while imitating the Johnson Smith Co.’s ads for novelty items in the back pages of comic books and other publications aimed at children

The first copies I saw didn’t identify the creator or the publication the page came from, and there was some question whether it was (as George V. Reilly, invoking Poe’s Law, put it) “a right-wing parody of progressive views, or a left-wing parody of right-wing opinions of progressive views”. Parody, certainly, but from what viewpoint?

So in its form it’s a parody of a genre of advertising hucksterism. And then in its specific content it’s a parody of a style of political talk (either mocking what’s framed as a preoccuption with kale, gun control, facts, and the like, or mocking those who engage in such mockery).

Much has now become clear. To start with, the copy of the page in #1 identifies the creator as Mary Trainor, and that provides enough context to eventually sort things out.

Background 1. Johnson Smith and its kin.From Wikipedia:

(#2) A Johnson Smith ad from 1980

The Johnson Smith Company (Johnson Smith & Co.) is a mail-order company established in 1914 by Alfred Johnson Smith in Chicago, Illinois, USA that sells novelty and gag gift items such as x-ray goggles, whoopee cushions, fake vomit, and joy buzzers. The company moved from Chicago to Racine, Wisconsin in 1926, to Detroit in the 1930s, and from the Detroit area to Bradenton, Florida in 1986.

The company would put ads in magazines devoted to children and young adults such as Boys’ Life, Popular Mechanics and Science Digest. Their ads appeared on the back cover of many historically significant comic books, including Action Comics #1, June 1938 (first appearance of the character Superman) and Detective Comics #27, May 1939 (first appearance of character Batman).

In 1970, humorist Jean Shepherd wrote the introduction for the reprint of The 1929 Johnson Smith & Co. Catalogue.

Johnson Smith is just the biggest of these back-of-the-magazine companies. Other, smaller companies offer(ed) more specialized fare. For example, there are the sea-monkeys, the wonderful sea-monkeys. See my 4/22/16 posting “Joe Orlando: a cartoonist and his sea-monkeys” — with this 1960s ad for them:

(#3)

Background 2. On libtard and contempt for libtards.

noun libtard: US informal, offensive a person with left-wing political views. ORIGIN early 21st century: blend of liberal and retard. [In fact, some time ago, the –tard of retard took on a life of its own as a formative in word formation, and it’s now a textbook example of a libfix. See my 1/23/10 posting “Libfixes”.]

Both parts come with a sting. From NOAD on one part:

noun retard: informal, offensive a mentally handicapped person (often used as a general term of abuse).[a clipping of retarded; GDoS1st cite 1967-8 in a survey of US undergraduate slang]

The Adj/N liberal has an extremely complex history as a political label. In the current usage of US conservatives, it’s a term of contempt and abuse, mocked from the liberal or progressive side by Geoff Nunberg in the wonderful title of his 2006 book:

Talking right: How conservatives turned liberalism into a tax-raising, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show

The right-wing critique mocked here proceeds by enumerating the life styles, the opinions, and the political goals of liberals in a way that treats them as frivolous, impractical, or dowright dangerous. The critique (as mocked by Nunberg and by Trainor in #1) tends to mix the trivial and the weighty in a way that’s familiar from other outpourings of grievance or annoyance combined with calls for action — as in the 1960s/70s campus radical manifestos that I once saw derided as demanding withdrawal from Vietnam, an end to racist policies on campus, and more bicycle racks in front of the library.

Poe’s law and its resolution. From Wikipedia:

Poe’s law is an adage of Internet culture stating that, without a clear indicator of the author’s intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the parodied views. The original statement, by Nathan Poe, read:

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won’t mistake for the genuine article.

In the case of #1, context supplies a resolution. Trainor’s career has been centered in two places: the Bongo Comics Group (associated with Matt Groening and The Simpsons) and the new incarnation of MAD Magazine. That’s solid-lefty territory: so #1 is making fun of rightwingers’ sourness about the left.

On Bongo Comics, from Wikipedia:

Bongo Comics Group was a comic book publishing company founded in 1993 by Matt Groening along with Steve & Cindy Vance and Bill Morrison. It published comics related to the animated television series The Simpsons and Futurama, as well as the SpongeBob SquarePants comic; along with original material. It was named after Bongo, a rabbit character in Groening’s comic strip Life in Hell.

Bongo has, at some time in its history, printed Simpsons Comics, Simpsons Comics and Stories, Futurama Comics, Krusty Comics, Lisa Comics, Bart Simpson, Bartman, Itchy & Scratchy Comics and Radioactive Man.

Lisa Comics #1 by Trainor:

(#4) From Alice’s Wonderland: A Visual Journey through Lewis Carroll’s Mad, Mad World by Catherine Nichols (2014), about how Wonderland has been imagined by artists, filmmakers, writers, and others

Then to MAD Magazine, which is where #1 comes from. The thing is, it’s from the April 2019 issue, which isn’t on the stands yet. The cover:

(#5) From Richmond Illustration Inc. (“Caricature and cartoon art studios”) on 2/18/19, “On the Stands: MAD #6” (April 2019)

And the table of contents:

(#6) (Cartoons in there by P.C. Vey and Lars Kenseth, cartoonists I’ve written about on this blog)

A note about MAD, from Wikipedia:

Mad (stylized as MAD) is an American humor magazine founded in 1952 by editor Harvey Kurtzman and publisher William Gaines, launched as a comic book before it became a magazine

… From 1952 until 2018, Mad published 550 regular issues … The magazine’s numbering reverted to 1 with its June 2018 issue, coinciding with the magazine’s headquarters move to the West Coast.

From Trainor’s bottom row: gay penguins, kneeling, science, Canada!. Science, dismissed as mumbo-jumbo here, is the weightiest matter; Canada, mocked here as merely the home of Bullwinkle J. Moose, is politically consequential; kneeling in protest, derided as self-advertisement here, is a matter of both political and moral significance; and attention to gay penguins, presumably too ridiculous to merit further attention here, is a stand-in for respect for lgbt people and their rights.

Just can’t let Canada and gay penguins go by without comment.

— Oh Canada! Trainor offers us a maple leaf on a t-shirt on Bullwinkle: a leaf shirt moose ‘moose in a shirt with a leaf on it’. Multi-part compounds are fun.

The resources of the net provide us also with:

(#7) A moose leaf shirt ‘shirt with a leaf with a moose on it on it’

(#8) A leaf moose shirt ‘shirt with a moose with a leaf on it on it’

(I saved the images, then had to do other things, then when I returned, couldn’t find the sources any more. My apologies.)

— Gay penguins. Since I’m a gay man with a penguin totem, obviously of great interest to me. Trainor’s drawing looks like a version of this image:

(#9) A mirror image photo, offered as a representation of the penguin couple Stan and Olli at the Berlin Zoo

Then there’s this more elaborate creation:

(#10) From Danielle Ackerman’s micmackerman site

Bonus play. On FB, I identified the artist and writer of #1 as Mary Trainor. Then this exchange:

BH: And doesn’t she also do those greeting cards depicting 50s women with snarky speech balloons?

AZ: Betsy Herrington That’s Anne Taintor. Are we starting one of those name [association] chains? [If so, then:] Next up: Nell (Irvin) Painter.

The allusion is to my 3/15/18 posting “Name association chains”:

On this blog on the 13th, some examples of a type of phrasal overlap portmanteau sometimes known as name chains: Billy Zane Grey, Billy Joel Grey, Fletcher Christian Grey. On reading this, Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky pointed me to a different way in which names can be chained, in a series of associations that’s sometimes used as a comedy routine. Elizabeth then sent me a wonderful example from Neil Gaiman’s Tumblr account.

With a chain of comic misidentifications, from various hands, following on Caroline Palmer’s suggestion that Neil Gaiman is the Sandman guy: Nah, I’m pretty sure he’s the dude that sings “Sweet Caroline” — leading to descriptions of:

Neil Diamond, Neil Armstrong, Neil Patrick Harris, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Neil Stevenson, Neil Young, Neil Hannon, Niels Bohr, Niles Crane, Nile Delta, Na’il Diggs, …

Easter creeps towards us
on little bunny feet,
Feet of marshmallow,
pink and yellow feet.

(#1)

Godzilla stalks,
Pursues, savages them.
Crunches their
Fluffy sweet bones.

Yes, Easter approaches: this Sunday is Palm Sunday, and a week after that, Easter Sunday. Easter baskets are being filled, eggs are being painted, my friend Chris Ambidge is preparing to retreat to the safety of his secret Peeps-proof cave beneath the streets of Toronto.

Meanwhile, Chris’s friends test his mettle by showering him with Peepsiana of all sorts. #1 above came to me on Facebook from Susan Fischer, who got it from someone else on FB, etc., back into the mists — and I put it on Chris’s FB timeline, shrieking  “Happy dinopocalyptic Easter!”  and setting off some amiably pointed chatter. Getting that out of the way:

— MM: Isn’t that Godzilla?
— AZ to MM: Yes, definitely Godzilla. So a Godzillocalypse. [or, possibly, a Godzillacalypse]

— CA: “dinopocalyptic” – now THERE’s a wonderful coinage.
— AZ to CA: wonderful coinage, but an obvious one, and not my own.

On the libfix front, first. The disaster libfix -(po)calypse has been attested in dinopocalypse for some time. Two occurrences, one from real life, one from fantasy.

From a 12/9/13 Radiolab story “Dinopocalypse”on public radio:

We’ve all heard the story of what happened on the day the dinosaurs died, right? Well, we thought we had. Turns out, high-powered ballistics experiments, fancy computer algorithms, and good old-fashioned ancient geology have given us a shocking new version of the events on that day, 66 million years ago. It’s a new theory that is so scarily precise — and hot — it’s terrifying and nearly unimaginable.

And then the fantasy drawing “Dinopocalypse DP” by MaxRomanchak on DeviantArt:

(#2)

As for Godzilla rather than dino as the first element in morphological combinations: the full compound Godzilla apocalypse is well attested, Godzillopocalypse isn’t attested at all (nor are Godzillocalypse or Godzillacalypse), but Godzillapocalypse gets some hits.

Distinguishing Godzilla from dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex. Godzilla is a fantasy theropod, T. rex a real one, but they also differ physically in many ways. Compare the Gojira in #1 with this typical reconstructed image of a T. rex:

(#3)

(Apparently the dinosaur was unable to stick its tongue out like that, but let that pass.)

Gojira has a small tail and substantial forelimbs, while T. rex has a huge tail and tiny forelimbs; Gojira lumbers about in an erect stance, while T. rex is usually represented as often taking a more horizontal stance; Gojira is heavily armored in ways that T. rex is not; and, of course, Gorjira is hugely, you might say monstrously, larger than T. rex. — 20 to 60 times as large (a lot of approximating and averaging is involved in these calculations).

From Wikipedia on the devising of Godzilla:

Within the context of the Japanese films, Godzilla’s exact origins vary, but it is generally depicted as an enormous, violent, prehistoric sea monster awakened and empowered by nuclear radiation. Although the specific details of Godzilla’s appearance have varied slightly over the years, the overall impression has remained consistent. Inspired by the fictional Rhedosaurus created by animator Ray Harryhausen for the film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Godzilla’s iconic character design was conceived as that of an amphibious reptilian monster based around the loose concept of a dinosaur with an erect standing posture, scaly skin, an anthropomorphic torso with muscular arms, lobed bony plates along its back and tail, and a furrowed brow. Art director Akira Watanabe combined attributes of a Tyrannosaurus, an Iguanodon, a Stegosaurus and an alligator to form a sort of blended chimera, inspired by illustrations from an issue of Life magazine. To emphasise the monster’s relationship with the atomic bomb, its skin texture was inspired by the keloid scars seen on survivors in Hiroshima. The basic design has a reptilian visage, a robust build, an upright posture, a long tail and three rows of serrated plates along the back. In the original film, the plates were added for purely aesthetic purposes, in order to further differentiate Godzilla from any other living or extinct creature. Godzilla is sometimes depicted as green in comics, cartoons and movie posters, but the costumes used in the movies were usually painted charcoal grey with bone-white dorsal plates up until the film Godzilla 2000.

The source of #1. Backtrack with me now to #1 and its source — as is usual, not identified or credited by anyone I’ve found. Google Images came nobly to my aid, however, quickly bringing me to the artist who created the scene in #1: Sherry (not otherwise identified) on her self-mocking Graceful Grandma site (“To know me is to wonder ‘What is the matter with this person?’. Also, I am not graceful at all, a bit bumbling really.”) on 3/22/16.

#1 is the middle image in a series of three:

Godzilla says “Happy Easter”: 1 Godzilla Scares Up Some Easter Bunny Peeps. 2 Godzilla Chases the Easter Bunny Through the Easter Fields. 3 Godzilla Has Pushed the Easter Bunny Peeps Too Far and They Take Back Easter.

Sherry has another, Peepsless, Godzilla series of three:

Godzilla and the Easter Bunny: 1 Vintage Godzilla Eliminates the EasterBunny. 2 Vintage Godzilla Stomps the Easter Bunny. 3 Vintage Godzilla Takes the Easter Bunny and the Easter Basket as Victory Swag.

The last of these:

(#4)

The great fountain of weird Peeps. From the Mental Floss site, “12 Weird Peeps Flavors to Try All Year Long” by Rebecca O’Connell on 3/27/18:

(#5)

1 Peeps Delight (blueberry; the line also includes vanilla, orange sherbet, strawberry, coconut, and sugar cookie), 2 Fruit Punch Peeps, 3 Pumpkin Spice Latte Peeps, 4 Cotton Candy Peeps, 5 Sour Watermelon Peeps, 6 Bubble Gum Peeps, 7 Party Cake Peeps, 8 Red Velvet Peeps, 9 Pancakes and Syrup Peeps, 10 Caramel Apple Peeps, 11 Sweet Lemonade Peeps, 12 Mystery Flavor Peeps (plain white, new surprise flavor)

Note especially 5 Sour Watermelon Peeps, which will become relevant below:

(#6)

The original peeps colors were yellow, pink, and white; blue, lavender, and green came along quickly. The original shape was a chick (hence the name Peeps), in yellow of course. The bunny shape followed soon thereafter, and other shapes are occasionally featured in promotions. The original flavor was “marshmallow” (as in marshmallow chicks) for everything; eventually, there were other flavors: vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, etc., up to the fanciful creations above.

Van Holten’s Pickle Flavored Peeps® Marshmallow Chicks. Offered by another of Chris Ambidge’s friends:

(#7)

First, Van Holten’s is a long-established pickle company. They make and sell standard pickles of many kinds, plus (for a long time now) Pickle-In-A-Pouch in a variety of flavors, and also one genuine piece of weirdness: Pickle-Ice, a pickle flavored freeze pop. But so far, no pickle-flavored marshmallow chicks.

(Another company, Accoutrements Toys and Novelties, now Archie McPhee Wholesale, offers a number of pickly novelties: pickle-flavored lip balm, pickle-flavored candy canes, etc. But no marshmallow chicks.)

The Just Born company makes some eccentric flavors of Peeps (see Sour Watermelon, Pancakes and Syrup above). But Just Born is the only firm making the marshmallow chicks called Peeps (note the ® in #6), and they don’t have a pickle flavor. And according to their own website, Van Holten’s doesn’t make marshmallow chicks (under any name).

Now note the similarity between the puzzling #7 and the genuine #6. #7 is a joke, son: it’s a Sour Watermelon Peeps package — not the one in #5, but one of somewhat different design — with Sour Watermelon replaced by Pickle Flavored and with a chick figure replaced by the Van Holten’s Pickle logo. This is a dog license with the word ‘dog’ crossed out and ‘cat’ written in in crayon.

In any case: happy pickled Godzillapocalyptic Easter, Chris! Enjoy its sour green crunchiness!

The 9/3 Pearls Before Swine:

(#1)

Great big themes:

anti-intellectualism: the distrust of, and rejection of, learning;

the ignorance of the young, elevated to a form of resolute stupidity;

mass hysteria: the amplification of irrational beliefs and behaviors in crowds

All packaged into dumbnado, with the libfix –nado, that entertaining pop-cultural product of the Sharknado movies.

The big ideas. Anti-intellectualism, as treated in Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963). More generally, from Wikipedia:

Anti-intellectualism is hostility to and mistrust of intellect, intellectuals, and intellectualism commonly expressed as deprecation of education and philosophy, and the dismissal of art, literature, and science as impractical and even contemptible human pursuits. Anti-intellectuals present themselves and are perceived as champions of common folk — populists against political and academic elitism — and tend to see educated people as a status class detached from the concerns of most people, and feel that intellectuals dominate political discourse and control higher education.

Totalitarian governments manipulate and apply anti-intellectualism to repress political dissent.

Youthful ignorance, hardened into invincible stupidity — dumbness, as in #1. The young are of course ignorant of many things; but we expect them to learn, as in this Bizarro from 2/2/12 (understanding stupid as ‘ignorant’):

(#2)

Sometimes, however we get arrested development.

Mass hysteria. In deliberative reasoning, relying on the collective wisdom of a community can yield high-quality decisions; see James Surowiecki‘s The Wisdom of Crowds (2004). But in contexts of high emotion, we are likely to get instead the “madness of crowds” (as in Charles Mackay’s ground-breaking Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)) — the sharing-out of stupid and dangerous ideas.

The third panel of #1 combines all of these themes in the image of a dumbnado, a swirling tempest of communal anti-intellectual stupidity. An image — and name —   fostered by the Sharknado films.

A cloud of sharks. From Wikipedia:

Sharknado is a series of American disaster horror comedy science-fiction films released by Syfy starting in 2013. The sixth film concluded the series in 2018. It has since been expanded into video games and comics, including a spin-off film, Sharknado: Heart of Sharkness, that was released in 2015.

The series stars Ian Ziering and Tara Reid as Fin Shepard and April Wexler, respectively; a husband and wife who continue to encounter “sharknadoes”, tornadoes filled with sharks, wherever they go.

Among the items on my Page on shark postings is this 7/26/15 one “Shirtless shark-fighting teens”: what unites SoCal teens, shirtless dancers, and fighters of flying sharks? Ian Ziering, that’s what. Seen below wielding his chainsaw (in Sharknado 2) against an airborne sharp-toothed menace:

(#3)

Ziering has had a substantial career in slickly produced, rather tacky entertainments. Highlights: Beverly Hills, 90210; Dancing with the Stars; a stint showing off his hunkiness as a Chippendales dancer; the Sharknado films; and now regular appearances on Swamp Thing and BH90210.

On August 18th, Max Vasilatos posted a little appreciation of the Sharnadoes on Facebook:

Yes, I do watch television. Yes, it’s easier sometimes when the thing on the tube doesn’t require much brain. Yes, I have “The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time” on. G’ahead, say something.

[my response:] I would be the last to carp or cavil, having caught up on Sharknado films 3 – 5 earlier today; now going to bed rather than experience 6. But it will always be there, lying in wait. An odd genre: slickly done, very competently made awful films, consequently quite enjoyable.

You get Ziering and his chainsaw, female characters cutting as close to the decorousness line as possible, plenty of appearances by (surprise!) David Hasselhoff, astonishingly preposterous plots, terrible puns and inside jokes, and professional-grade acting by everybody involved, but utterly without any human depth to their characters — which makes it possible for the producers to bloodily kill off sympathetic major characters without compunction. Nobody is safe.

And then the –nado words, for the stuff that gets swept up into those storm clouds: bouldernado, cownado, that sort of thing. Let’s savor them for a while now.

Life in Nadoland. I’ll start with the story “The plot of “Sharknado” is a little implausible, but the popularity of “nado” is a fact” by Rebecca Kruth & Anne Curzan on 2/10/19 on the Michigan Radio site (and, presumably, some other public radio sites):

If you haven’t had the good fortune of watching any of the six “Sharknado” movies, all you need to know is that in the first movie, a freak cyclone in the Pacific Ocean causes waterspouts that scoop up sharks and wreak havoc on Los Angeles. A man named Fin (yes, really) sets out to rescue his estranged wife April and encounters all manner of shark-related obstacles.

From there, the series gets a little-far fetched.

The first “Sharknado” movie got some buzz when it came out in 2013. In fact, the American Dialect Society took notice, and voted “sharknado” 2013’s most unnecessary word of the year.

In an article for Vice, journalist Mark Peters wrote, “It’s really a shame that [sharknado] did not get nominated for most productive.” Peters had been searching for other “nado” creations and found things like “boatnado,” “poodlenado,” “beardnado,” and “sushinado.”[I haven’t been able to find this VICE piece by Peters, but below I’ll cite a different article of his.]

From a linguistics perspective, we wanted to know, exactly what is “nado”? People talk about blends when they write about “nado,” but they will sometimes talk about it as a suffix.

“I’m a little uncomfortable calling [nado] a suffix. I would call it a combining form,” says English professor Anne Curzan. A combining form is when we’ve taken a word – it could be a blend – and we’ve analyzed it into different parts. We then clip off a part and attach it to other things.

One of the most common examples is “holic.” The word “alcoholic” comes from “alcohol” plus “ic.” However, we reinterpreted it, chopped off the “holic” part, and then started attaching it to other things. That’s where words like “shopaholic” and “workaholic” came from.

There’s some chance that “nado” is also a combining form, since it got clipped off from “tornado” and is now being attached to other things like [a] baconado Bloody Mary.

Some terminological matters. First, the term blend above refers to intentional word combinations of the sort I prefer to refer to as portmanteaus — sharknado is a portmanteau of shark and tornado, conveying something close to the compound shark tornado, or the nominal tornado of sharks, but even more compressed. (I prefer to reserve the term (word) blend for inadvertent errors in which words are combined.)

Then, there’s combining form. The prevailing usage of this term is for elements like bio– and –cide — historically from Greek or Latin stems; in English, they are semantically and accentually just compound elements, but they are bound, like affixes. Michael Quinion’s affixes site treats them as a subtype of (derivational) affix.

Curzan’s usage above extends the term to cover material that has been chopped out of existing words to make a new word-forming element: –holic (from alcoholic) conveying addiction, –tastic (from fantastic) conveying excellence or remarkableness, and so on. And she extends the term as well to such elements — like the –nado of cownado — retrieved from portmanteaus.

If we knew nothing of the history of these elements, we’d just classify them as (accent-bearing) derivational affixes. But, as I suggested in a 1/23/10 posting “Libfixes”, it might be useful to have a term that recognizes their history:

[on] the “liberation” of parts of words [like –tard, –flation, and –naut], to yield word-forming elements that are semantically like the elements of compounds but are affix-like in that they are typically bound.

… Quinion’s “combining forms” include both liberated elements and elements from complex learnèd forms, as in thermometer. It would be nice to have a term for the liberated elements that is both more memorable than “combining forms” and also signals the origin of these elements in the reanalysis of existing words (whether the source words are ordinary words, as with –tacular, or portmanteaus, as with –dar [based on gaydar, a portmanteau of gay and radar]. I suggest libfix

Now from Nancy Friedman’s Fritinancy blog on 11/19/18 in “Word of the week: Firenado” (following the horrific Paradise fire in California):

I couldn’t find a coinage date for firenado, but it follows a pattern established by snownado, “an extremely rare instance of a waterspout forming under the base of a snow squall” that’s more accurately called a snowspout. In 2014, Mark Peters wrote [on the Vocabulary.com blog] about snownado and other snow-compounds; he linked snownado to the unexpectedly popular 2013 movie Sharknado. (The movie also spawned such novel compounds as ratnado, boatnado, and polarnado.)

From Mark’s piece, “Snownados in Hothlanta: The World of Weather Blends” on 2/11/14:

In fact, –nado is right up there with -shaming, -splaining, and –elfie when it comes to the giddy production of new words. These words fit into a few categories.

Some are direct plays on Sharknado, a “so bad it’s good” disaster movie featuring, you guessed it, a tornado of sharks. That cinema classic was definitely in the minds of writers who coined words such as Boat-nado, Ratnado, and the corny Pi-rat-nado in relation to the discovery of a “ghost ship filled with cannibal rats.” The movie also seems like an influence on an artwork that could only have been called a Guitar-nado. Elsewhere, someone combined the polar vortex and sharknado into an adorable polar nado, as in tornado of polar bears. Considering the disappearance of polar bears’ habitat, I’m afraid that image may soon be as real as a recent catnado.

Some folks use the suffix for metaphorical storms, such as the behavior of a toddler: “A toddler-nado hit my parents living room earlier today. Toys were thrown fun was had and no one was injured.” After looking at the picture with that tweet, I take back the word metaphorical. Perhaps due to fatigue with gate, some have called New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s traffic scandal bridge-nado. I’m no Al Roker, but I’ve also spotted poodlenado, beardnado, thongnado, and sushinado. To paraphrase a classic Batman story, “Sushinado would be a good death.”

Of course, some uses are actually weather-related, like snownado, which is a word for a winter waterspout.

And that’s the news from Nadoland.

Circulating on Facebook (and many other sites) recently, this penguinocalypse cartoon:

(#1)

I call this a cartoon because it’s a marriage of a quite specific text with a quite specific image, circulated as humor. In fact, I haven’t been able to find this text without this image, or this image without this text (right down to the illegible credit in the lower right-hand corner). Nor have I found any variants of this text, or any variants of this image. #1 is a unique artistic creation, just like the other cartoons I post about here — of the subtype in which the image is taken from some other source (in this case, it’s a photoshopped carnivore penguin) rather than drawn by the creator. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to discover who the creator was.

As it turns out, this is the third appearance of the cartoon, exactly as above, on this blog. Sadly, I am a forgetful person. Previously:

— on 1/5/17, in “The carniguin”, with the note:

Side benefit: the -ocalypse word penguinocalypse. The usual libfix is –pocalypse; this version is shortened to improve on the somewhat awkward penguinpocalypse (with its /n – p/ sequence).

— on 2/1/18, in “The penguins are coming, the penguins are coming”, with the note:

A bonus is the occurrence of the disaster libfix -(po)calypse in penguinocalypse.

The hybrid creature. The sharp-toothed photoshopped penguin in #1 is a composite of an actual open-mouthed penguin and some other open-mouthed creature with fearsome teeth. Given its tongue and the rest of its mouth, the fearsome creature is clearly not a reptile (in particular, not a snake), but a meat-eating mammal. Well, it might be a leopard seal — that would have some poetry going for it, since leopard seals famously prey on penguins (see my 10/15/19 posting “Sharing your penguin”) — or some kind of large cat, or perhaps a wild dog (for instance, a wolf). Models for comparison to seal and cat (thanks to Kim Darnell for finding these photos):

(#2) A Paul Nicklen photo from the blog posting “A National Geographic Photographer vs. a Leopard Seal”

(#3) From a story in the Daily Mail (UK), “Another tough day on the game reserve! Brilliant pictures capture the moment a lion wakes up from his afternoon nap”

The details of the dentition are clearly cat-like rather than seal-like. And in fact more cat-like than wolf-like. A snarling wolf:

(#4) From the HourlyWolves account on Twitter

(I note that it took me a very long time to find a wolf-mouth photo that didn’t come with a fee for use.)

A closer thing, but I still say cat.

Memes. As it happens, the term meme is a candidate in the competition today for the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Decade (at its meeting in New Orleans). The ADS definition:

meme: a shared cultural item in the form of a phrase, image, or video circulated online, often with humorous, creative alterations

The history of the term is complex — see the Wikipedia page — but there is often a pretty crisp distinction between a specific cultural item that circulates virally and a form or template that circulates in this way. This is the difference between a widely distributed quotation or other linguistic expression and a widely distributed snowclone based on such an expression: between Pink is the new black and the The New Y snowclone (X is the new Y, as exemplified in 60 is the new 40 and hundreds of others).

It is also the difference between a widely distributed specific cartoon — like #1 or the Carl Rose / E.B. White New Yorker cartoon with the caption including “I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it” — and cartoon forms like Psychiatrist, Desert Island, Grim Reaper, etc. (many catalogued in my Page on comic conventions).

This is a useful distinction, and I’ve used meme to refer to the templates rather than to the specific cultural objects, but current popular usage uses meme for both. I particular, #1 is generally referred to as a meme. (I have no snappy term that picks out viral specific objects, however, so I’m just pointing out the distinction.)

There are, in fact, templates for humorous images related to the penguinocalypse cartoon. For example, there’s a genre of fearsome hybrid penguin images, like this DeviantArt penguin-whale by oringebob, a hybrid of penguin and orca / killer whale:

(#5)

And a genre of fire-breathing penguin images (check the text in #1), like this one by TheUnseenNobody on Imgur:

(#6)

(It comes with the ad built in, unfortunately.)