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

the king’s figure of speech

my eudora email client has been pulsing with electronic letters from a handful of friends, fake friends, and adultfriendfinder.com friends with hawt news about the rhetorical device known as the paraprosdokian. here’s what jimmy wales has to say about it »

A paraprosdokian is a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe or reinterpret the first part. It is frequently used for humorous or dramatic effect, sometimes producing an anticlimax. For this reason, it is extremely popular among comedians and satirists.

blah blah blah, let’s get to some examples of paraporsdokia before we all fall asleep:

• If I am reading this graph correctly—I’d be very surprised. —Stephen Colbert
• If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. — Dorothy Parker
• I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it. —Groucho Marx
• A modest man, who has much to be modest about. —Winston Churchill
• I like going to the park and watching the children run around because they don’t know I’m using blanks. —Emo Phillips
• If I could say a few words, I’d be a better public speaker. —Homer Simpson
• I haven’t slept for two weeks, because that would be too long. —Mitch Hedberg

my conclusion: a paraprosdokian is a long word for a one-liner.

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like the word ecdysiast, paraprosdokian is likely a modern greek neologism for a historical greek stimulus.

meta-phor-play

as a wee raynorling, i lumped the concept of metaphor into the same category as rhyme and alliteration—mere ornaments of language. but just as my taste in fashion matured from aeropostale and abercrombie & fitch to armani and prada so too have my thoughts on the importance of the metaphor. 

indeed i now recognise the metaphor as the very nature of human thought. to understand through metaphor is perhaps our single greatest evolutionary advantage. it is what has elevated the house of homo to the top spot in the kingdom animalia—and as far as i’m convinced, the sole reason why the robots will never conquer us, even the ones that look like arnold schwarzenegger.

i could rant on and on but i will spare you. instead i will treat you to a few f-entries from a dictionary of similes by frank jenners wilstach (1917). this extraordinary book groups metaphors by key words. thus, were i unfamiliar with the concept of melancholy, i could turn to page 256 and see how great poets described the concept in terms of other things. goethe says, “melancholy as a slighted damsel.” poe describes it as “the moaning of the distant sea.” and hawthorne: “like the voice of a child that was spending its infancy without playfulness.” and now i have fairly good idea of what melancholy is without having ever read its actual definition. this is the power of metaphor.

here are some other entries in the key word of f:

• That face of yours looks like the title-page of a whole volume of roguery. —Colley Cibber
• A face that was like an open letter in a foreign tongue. —Henry James
• Faces did glister like the key-hole of a powdering-tub.—Rabelais
• Fades like a once-heard tale.—Lewis Morris
• Failed like a brief dream of unremaining glory.—Shelley
• Faint as the music that in dreams we hear.—Mary A. de Vere
• Fair as original light first from the chaos shot.—Richard Lovelace
• Fall like small birds beaten by the storm against a dead wall, dead.—P.J. Bailey
• Falls like a slaughtered beast headless.—Swinburne
• Familiar as a voice of home.—John Crawford
• Fangless as the fat worms of the grave.—James Whitcomb Riley
• Ferocious as a bogus archangel full of cocaine.—H.L. Mencken
• Fierce as a blast of hate from hell.—Swinburne
• More fine than moonbeams.—Ibid.
• Fists like shoulders of mutton.—Balzac
• Foaming at the mouth like champagne bottles.—Israel Zangwill
• Follow one another like ducks in a gutter.—Beaumont and Fletcher
• Fragrant as the breath of angels.—O.W. Holmes
• Fruitless as the lamentations of a prophet crying in the wilderness.—Frank Horridge

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.”

getting mad fuzl’d

for reasons that i shan’t go into here, me and my handsome male friends and curvy female friends/former lovers watched the entirety of the superbowl on a tivo’d time delay of about twenty minutes. the setup was going fine until the fourth quarter when almost immediately after tracy porter’s game-changing interception, the tivo inexplicably deactivated and a visual of sean peyton jerking off the vince lamborghini trophy amid a flurry of confetti flashed onto the screen. we had lost the last 20 minutes of the game and reverted to live t.v.!

in a way, it was kind of like some benevolent deity had granted us the power of clairvoyance, that we got to see the immediate result of a well-executed, pivotal play. in another way it was as if some malevolent devil had caused us all to prematurely ejaculate into our underpants.

in any event, because most of us—including yours truly—were rooting for the saints, we all proceeded to get mad fuzl’d and crump footed after the game. in honour of the saints and the wanton powers of orson’s tivo machine, here are the 18 f-words that benjamin franklin listed as synonyms for being inebriated in his drinker’s dictionary (1737).

He’s Fishey, Fox’d, Fuddled, Sore Footed, Frozen, Well in for’t, Owes no Man a Farthing, Fears no Man, Crump Footed, Been to France, Flush’d, Froze his Mouth, Fetter’d, Been to a Funeral, His Flag is out, Fuzl’d, Spoke with his Friend, Been at an Indian Feast

how to plagiarize with style

just append the following disclaimer to your next term paper and everything will smell like roses:

It may happen therefore, and it is hoped it will be so, that I may sometimes appear to have plagiarized from other [sources] and to have adopted their views; but this correspondence must, nevertheless be accepted as a further proof of the accuracy of my honest independent labours.

from nasology: or hints towards a classification of noses by george jabet (1848).

misc portmanteaux deux

if there is one thing metallica fans like us know, it’s that metallica is a portmanteau of metallic + replica. speaking of portmanteaux, here are a few that i have been dreaming up since posting the first list exactly 400 days ago*.

• fauxtest: (faux + protest) when one pretends to object but secretly consents. as in: “i know that you actually want to see the latest rom-com with that curvy starlet, stop fauxtesting.”
• nonline: (not + online) the opposite of online, a synonym of irl. as in: “i have over 400 online friends but only six nonline ones.”
• femine: (feminine + famine) a dearth of females (cf. sausage party)
• purityrannical: (puritanical + tyrant) of the nature of a religiously and politically conservative authoritarian figure
• bar-b-coup: (barbecue + coup) to override your vegetarian friend’s crappy suggestion to meet up at a nasty falafel joint and instead reroute the party to a bitching bbq spot.

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*this is the second post in the misc portmanteax series. posts in this series publish themselves every 400 days. the next post is scheduled for release on october 24, 2011 at which point the mayan gods will have eaten the earth for fourings.

WATCH BIG-TITTED MILFS GET HARDCORED 24-7

thus was the subject line of a piece of spam™ that infiltrated my gmail this morning and all i could think was: look at all that inventive anthimeria!

anthimeria is using one word class as a member of a different word class (eg. using a noun for a verb). this literary device is deftly employed not once, not twice, but thrice in the 6-word, ithyphallic spam header.

• the noun phrase, big tits is used as an adjective
• the adjective, hardcore is used as a verb
• the cardinal numbers, 24 and 7 are used as an adverb

and yet: one could cram even more anthimeria into the header by saying something like, “eyeball big-titted milfs…”

nouns as adjectives? adjectives as verbs? has the world gone topsy-turvy or is this a WORD CLASS KEY PARTY OF EPIC PROPORTIONS?!?!

on a semi-related note*: i will be occupied for the next 24/7.

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* a note related to my semi

minced oaths

make certain that there is NO liquid in your mouth when reading the last bullet or you will be doing a spit take worthy of groucho marx »

• The TV broadcast edit of Snakes on a Plane has Samuel L. Jackson saying “I have had it with these monkey-fighting snakes on this Monday-to-Friday plane”, emending two occurrences of motherfucking.
• In the film The Big Lebowski, John Goodman’s character repeatedly yells, “This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass” while trashing a car. It was censored on television as “This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps.”

my world of warcraft nom de guerre

kennings have been on m’mind ALL WEEK. here is a tasty little trivia-nugget brimming with kick-ass eths and thorns regarding recursive kennings »

The longest kenning found in skaldic poetry occurs in Hafgerðingadrápa by Þórður Sjáreksson and reads nausta blakks hlé-mána gífrs drífu gim-slöngvir “fire-brandisher of blizzard of ogress of protection-moon of steed of boat-shed”, which simply means “warrior”.

while we are on the topic of autological words…

here is one of my favourites (it also has great mouthfeel).

elelendish - of another land, foreign. from old english eilland (foreign land)

look at the first five letters of elelendish and tell me truthfully that the word does not describe itself. but beware of elelendish’s autological paradox: the more you use it, the less autological it becomes.

the paradox of the present

you are now the oldest you have ever been and the youngest you will ever be.

(this is my attempt at coining an epigram, though i’m sure that some jerkwad poet probably said something similar 400 years ago when he was trying to seduce an earl’s chambermaid (or whatever)).

to all aspiring porn bloggers:

• “Lusty” means “brimming with vigor and good health” or “enthusiastic.” Don’t confuse it with “lustful,” which means “filled with sexual desire.”
• “Sensual” usually relates to physical desires and experiences, and often means “sexy.” “Sensuous” is more often used for esthetic pleasures, like “sensuous music.”
• Crevices are by definition tiny. A huge crack in a glacier is given the French spelling: crevasse.