miscellaneous portmanteaux trois

every 400 days for the rest of my life, i plan to release a new batch of coined portmanteau words into the wild and see if any of them stick. 400 days ago, i told you about bar-b-coup and nonline which have since risen to #451 and #1,033 on the mla’s list of hot new words to watch out for™. 800 days ago, i told you about farticle and gratuitesque and now these two words alone comprise 40% of every word on wikipedia. i wonder what the future will hold for this year’s batch?

• mockward (mock + awkward) a seemingly uncomfortable social interaction where all parties are actually feigning embarrassment. “atticus and hugo drunkenly hooked up again last night. they pretended to be embarrassed about it, but the interaction was decidedly mockward.”
• dreadline (dread + deadline) a date on or before which an undesirable project must be completed. “april 15th marks the national dreadline of tax day.”
• squeemail (squee + email) an overly-excited email. “she sent me a squeemail after hearing the good news that my dandruff problem is now a thing of the past.”
• affluential (affluent + influential) using one’s wealth to control or manipulate. “the koch brothers are affluential a-holes.”
• adorifice (adore + orifice) a preferred orifice. “i always enjoy that particular aperture baby-cakes, but it’s my birthday and i’d love a shot at my adorifice.”

the next post in this series will be published on november 27, 2012 by which time iowa city will have elected its first minotaur to the office of mayor.

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previous to this: miscellaneous portmanteaux un et deux

some peculiar fan community nicknames

• Avatards (Avatar: The Last Airbender or Avatar)
• Buffistas (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
• Daisy-Pushers (Pushing Daisies) 
• Darklings (Darkwing Duck)
• Dunderheads (US version of The Office)
• Gleeks (Glee)
• Heroes or Colbert Nation (The Colbert Report) 
• Leaper (Quantum Leap)
• Lostralians (Lost)
• Pokémaniac (Pokémon)
• Sidekicks (Heroes)
• Transfans (Transformers)
• Wheel Watchers (Wheel of Fortune)
• Wingnuts (The West Wing)
• Whovians (Doctor Who)
• X-Philes (The X-Files)
• Xenites (Xena: Warrior Princess)

transfans?

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for a whole lot more (including fans of bands, movies, and videogames): tvtropes.org

some peculiar adjectival forms of country names

on my flight back from wyoming, i was seated next to a woman who claimed to be a resident of the principality of monaco. obviously, this led to a conversation about the only (and perhaps stereotypical) items that i know about that particular micro-state: gambling, f1 racing, and grace kelly. at some point, i fumbled when trying to use the adjectival form of the country by muttering something like, “MO-knockin” or “monna-KANDER,” and was informed that the proper word was, quite unexpectedly, “monégasque.”

that got me thinking about irregular demonyms and which other countries had peculiar forms. here are a few »

• Azerbaijan → Azeri
• Barbados → Bajan
• Botswana → Motswana
• Côte d’Ivoire → Ivorian
• Cyprus → Cypriot
• Greenland → Greenlandic
• Hungary → Magyar
• Isle of Man → Manx
• Lesotho → Basotho
• Luxembourg → Luxembourgish
• Madagascar → Malagasy
• The Netherlands → Dutch
• Philippines → Filipino
• Switzerland → Swiss

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incidentally, the wikipedia article contains this delightful shoutout:

In some of the latter cases the noun is formed by adding -man or -woman, for example English/Englishman/Englishwoman; Irish/Irishman/Irishwoman; Chinese/Chinese man/Chinese woman (versus the archaic or derogatory terms Chinaman/Chinawoman, which are not the preferred nomenclature).

my monday listicle

apparently, some whack-a-doo movie is coming out soon about shakespeare and how shakespeare didn’t really write shakespeare which reminds me of a line from the royal tenenbaums:

Well, everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What this book presupposes is… maybe he didn’t.

i figure i might as well hop on the shakespeare conspiracy bandwagon by positing that shakespeare is secretly controlling the fate of modern literature from beyond the grave. consider these popular novels which all got their titles from shakespearean works. what does it all mean? »

• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• Cakes and Ale by William Somerset Maugham
  
• The Dogs of War by Frederick Forsyth
  
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
  
• Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
  
• Pomp and Circumstance by Noel Coward
• Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
  
• Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde
• Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick
  
• Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy
• What Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson
• The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck

on college reunions

if you’re an insufferable gossip-monger like me and get your jollies from discussing the latest romps of your former classmates to other former classmates, then you will enjoy ephraim eliot’s account of what happened to all his buddies in the harvard graduating class of 1780.

eliot spares nobody (even himself) and were i to identify with anyone from this list, it would be poor daniel sargent who was more interested in greasing his (presumably luxorious) hair than committing himself to scholarship.

here follows an edited verstion of eliot’s private report, entitled: some account of my classmates in college who graduated in 1780

• Philip Draper : rusticated from the former class. Had capacity, but was a Rascal.
• Ephhaim Eliot: a scholar below mediocrity — never was well fitted for college — not being design’d for a public education, push’d in, because there was a suspension of business owing to war in 1776, but jogg’d along unnotic’d and made a good apothecary. Became paralytic.
• Aahon Hastings: good at classics; became insane & died miserable.
• James Hewes smuggled into the class without residence or rank in it at the time of graduating, to the disgrace of the government. A contemptible lawyer — very immoral & despised in society.
• Jacob Kimball: an elegant scholar at entrance. Time being on his hands, & having nothing to employ him, he fell a sacrifice to a parcel of unprincipled gamblers who swindled him. Was a great scientist, psalm singer & composer, in that branch of music. Became a dissipated sot.
• Joseph Prince: excellent scholar but unfortunate in life. Was burnt to death in the State of Maine.
• Daniel Sargent: Taken in to add to numbers in 1776. Never had an idea in his life, except to grease his hair and clean his buckles.
• Jesse Thomas: studied physic, went to Maine to practice, where he was probably murder’d to get posession of money.
• James True: a steady, clever man, and somewhat of a scholar, when he entered. Became deranged in mind, and died crazy. Followed no business.

my takeaway: maine was not the place to be in the late 18th century.

if cleopatra were a scent, what scent would she be?

according to basenotes.net, the online social network for people who love smells, here are some possible candidates for cleopatra in odor form:

• l’occitane’s eau d’iparie
• jasmine and sandalwood
• pink pepper + wormwood + clove + french labdanum + oak moss + styrax + leather
• hermès’ eau de nil
• papyrus reed
• oil of lily
• a blend of cinnamon, myrrh, cardamom, saffron, frankincense and calamus,
• opium
• estée lauder’s youth dew

i am not making this stuff up, people. this is real.

13 gifts to woo a well-bred girl

Until a young man is accepted as an affianced husband, he should not presume to offer gifts of jewelry. In society…it is decreed that a lady may be offered no gift that implies an obligation or the necessity of restoration to its donor in case his courtship proves unsuccessful. It is not, therefore, permitted a gentleman to offer a gift of gloves, a hair-comb, a scarf, etc. But he may bestow

• a fan
• books
• magazines
• bonbons
• fruit
• a tennis-racket
• a riding-whip or crop
• a pet dog
• a picture
• a camera
• a dog-whistle
• a golf-club
• a silver or gold-mounted pen or pencil
• etc

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faithfully excerpted from a published source in the public domain—without context; devoid of gloss; lacking commentary; and stripped of title, author, and publication date.

taking youtube genres to their mad absurd extremes

i no longer have my own youtube channel so it is up to you to develop these million-view video concepts as you see fit:

• lip dub: you and your accomplices perform a highly choreographed, long take lip-synch of milli-vanilli songs. remember: when milli chest-bumps vanilli, you and your accomplices must do so with the same slow motion gaiety.
• recut trailer: rearrange clips of wes anderson’s the royal tenenbaums to the tune of beautiful girl by sean kingston so it seems like a wacky suicide romcom. 
• supercut: make a supercut of notable landmarks/buildings getting destroyed by asteroids, aliens, supervillians, or godzillas in famous disaster movies. for the background music use a suitable thrash metal tune like drowning pool’s let the bodies hit the floor—or—if you want something a little more highbrow, you could try vera lynn’s we’ll meet again.

elements of a victorian sensation novel

• bigamous marriages
• misdirected letters
• romantic triangles
• heroines placed in physical danger
• drugs, potions, and/or poisons
• characters adopt disguises
• strained coincidences
• aristocratic villains

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from victorianweb.org. seems almost tomgauldian, don’t it?

peculiar starting player rules

i played pandemic for like 16 hours yesterday. what really tickled my crinkle-cut pickle was the rule for determining which player gets to start first. in most games the starting player is selected either randomly or who is oldest. in pandemic it is determined by who was most recently sick. orson, who had his bowels scrambled by salmonella in thailand, was the lucky person who got to start.

after re-reading the guides of other games, it seems that pandemic is not alone. here are some other bizarre rules for who gets to go first: 

• alhambra · whoever has the least money
• the bridges of shangri-la · whoever last reached the peak of everest using nothing but blue and white checkered stilts carved from the wood of a mammoth tree. in case of a tie, the wisest player starts
• cartagena  · whoever looks most like a pirate
• fluxx · the first person to declare a desire to go first gets to go first
• for sale · the player who lives in the largest house
• gloom · the player who has had the worst day
• guillotine · the player with the longest neck
• settlers of catan · the oldest player
  
• small world · the player with the pointiest ears
• ticket to ride · the most experienced traveler

by my reckoning, i should be playing guillotine more often because my neck is so long that when hot vampire chicks are feeding off of me, they can do it in parallel and nobody has got to worry about sloppy seconds.

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believe it or not: there is an entire game that players can play for the sole purpose of determining which player gets to play first.

other peculiarities: stage directions, epitaphs

source: here & here & my own game library

ragbag readers’ favourite stage directions

who knew that my brief breech of the proscenium would cause so many of you to send me erotic poulets filled with your own favourite stage directions? who knew that stage directions were a thing that a *regular* person had a favourite of? who cares? thanks to 4 anonymous ragbag readers (or people that pretend to read it), today’s post has written itself:

from shakespeare’s titus andronicus:

• Enter the empress’ sons, with lavina, her hands cut off, and her tongue cut out, and ravish’d

from shakespeare’s much ado about nothing:

• Enter Prine, Leonato, Claudio and Jacke Wilson

the only problem is that “jacke wilson” is not in this scene nor in the play at all. from wagner’s götterdämmerung:

• The flames immediately flare up so that the fire fills the whole space in front of the hall and appears to seize on the building itself. Horrified, the men and women press to the very front of the stage. When the whole stage seems engulfed in fire, the glow suddenly dies down, so that soon all that remains is a cloud of smoke which drifts away to the back of the stage, setting the horizon as a layer of dark cloud. At the same time the Rhine overflows its banks in a mighty flood, surging over the conflagration.

from ring lardner’s [dadaist drama] i gaspiri:

• The curtain is lowered for seven days to denote the lapse of a week

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beckett bonus: the stage directions for beckett’s ghost trio specify that the door leading to a room stage right should be ‘imperceptibly ajar’.

peculiar elizabethan stage directions

• enter hieronimo; he knocks up the curtain
• hell is discovered
• volpone peeps from behind a traverse
• eugenius discovered sitting loaded with many irons; a lampe burning by him; then enter clowne with a piece of browne bread and a garret root
• a couch discovered with the duke on it
• enter lopez at a table with jewels and money upon it, an egg roasting by a candle
• exit orestes dragging clytemnestra’s body
• enter gloucester and buckingham in rotten armour, marvelous ill-favoured
• haughty, centaur, mavis, mrs otter, epicene, trusty, having discovered part of the scene above
• enter giovanni and annabella lying on a bed
• nuns discovered singing
• dashing of brains heard within

and of course, the always-intriguing cue from the winter’s tale

• exit, pursued by a bear

the japanese are such an interesting little people

in his treatise on bromides, burgess lists 47 trite remarks used by the narrow-minded. he says:

It is not merely because this remark is trite; it is because that, with the Bromide, the remark is inevitable. One expects it from him, and one is never disappointed. And, moreover, it is always offered by the Bromide as a fresh, new, apt and rather clever thing to say. He really believes, no doubt, that it is original—it is, at any rate, neat, as he indicates by his evident expectation of applause.

he calls these phrases bromidioms. perhaps the single shiniest bromidiom of our time is <ahem> “that’s what she said.” here are a few from burgess’ time. it’s a gas to see how little things have changed in the intervening one hundred years:

• “I don’t know much about Art, but I know what I like”
• “It isn’t money, it’s the PRINCIPLE of the thing I object to.”
• “Why aren’t there any good stories in the magazines, nowadays?”
• “The Japanese are such an interesting little people!”
• “The Salvation Army reaches a class of people that churches never do.”
• “It’s bad enough to see a man drunk—but, oh! a woman!”
• “It’s a mistake for a woman to marry a man younger than herself —women age so much faster than men. Think what she’ll be, when he’s fifty!”
• “It isn’t so much the heat, as the humidity.”
• “I’d rather have a good horse than all the automobiles made.”
• “I’d rather go to a dentist than have my photograph taken.”
• “You can live twenty years in New York and never know who is your next-door neighbor is.”