Reduplicative compounds

Today’s Rhymes With Orange:

Hippy-dippy, artsy-fartsy. Compound-like combinations with parts that aren’t semantically independent but are related phonologically, in this case by rhyme. In addition to rhyming reduplication (as in these cases), there’s also exact reduplication (yada yada, wee wee, chi chi; see this posting for the clever  punning invention tako-taco) and ablaut reduplication (chitchat, dilly-dally, tittle-tattle), with the accented vowel varied but the remainder of the components remaining the same. Many reduplicative compounds are negative in tone, as hippy-dippy and artsy-fartsy are in ordinary usage. For hippy dippy in the cartoon, more is going on, since there’s a pun on dip involved.

Cyanide and Happiness roundup

Five strips from the webcomic Cyanide and Happiness, with various points of linguistic interest (some incidental to the humor of the strip).

Underdog

In the Television section of the New York Times on the 19th, an obit (by Daniel E. Slotnik) for W. Watts Biggers, creator of the tv animated cartoon Underdog (a show that gave me much pleasure when it first came out and now does again, as I watch it on DVD with my grand-daughter).

Rhyme, rhyme, I need a rhyme

Today’s Zits has Jeremy boxing himself into a corner:

Oh my, a musical book report. On The Great Gatsby. Jeremy should have thought ahead.

Popular belief is that words without (perfect) rhymes are extraordinary, but in fact they’re pretty common, as Mark Liberman noted on Language Log several years ago.

Pocket reference to half-rhyme

Woke up this morning — Solstice Day — to the distinctive sound of Tom Waits‘s voice singing his own “Ol ’55″, with the haunting chorus:

Now the sun’s coming up,
I’m riding with Lady Luck,
Freeway cars and trucks,
Stars beginning to fade,
And I lead the parade.

Words that seem to suggest all sorts of interpretive possibilities, but certainly begin with a kind of pocket reference guide to types of half-rhyme: the first three lines, rhyming up, luck, and trucks, illustrate feature rhyme (up vs. luck, with /p/ vs. /k/, two voiceless stops differing only in the feature of point of articulation and so “sounding alike”) and subsequence rhyme (luck vs. trucks, with /k/ vs. /ks/, the first being a subsequence of the second and so, again, “sounding alike”).

Dick Crazy

From my friend Max yesterday, a postcard version of artwork by Michael Kupperman for The Believer:

It starts with a series of rhyming compounds — Maceface, Spacerace Face, Afro Laceface — and then branches out into merely preposterous compounds (with images to go along with them), like Moby Dickface and Mount Rushmore Face.

And then there’s Dick Crazy, an imperfect pun on Dick Tracy.

rock snot

From Ned Deily on Facebook, a report of a Morning Call (Allentown PA and the Lehigh Valley) story on rock snot. Here’s yesterday’s headline:

Delaware River rock snot bloom approaches Easton

An outbreak of didymo, a single-cell algae, threatens ecosystem, nearby streams.

JD Malone’s story begins:

Erik Silldorff waded a dozen feet into the river, just off a rock bar in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. He plucked a stone from the chilly, clear water and pointed to a mass of brownish slime with tan tendrils.

“That’s a pretty snotty rock,” said Silldorff, a biologist for the Delaware River Basin Commission.

Didymo, a single-cell algae dubbed rock snot for its khaki color and its consistency, is in bloom in the Delaware from Hancock, N.Y., to the PPL power plant near Martins Creek in Lower Mount Bethel Township — about 90 miles of boogered rocks.

Disco Duck

Today’s Zippy, supremely silly:

Not a burlesque, but a genuine novelty hit from the heyday of disco.

Contaminated by 9/11

(Eventually there will be some stuff directly related to language.)

Reported several places in the last week, the fate of the musical Kismet in Johnstown PA. Here’s Scott Simon on NPR on the 24th:

Canceling The School Play Won’t Avoid ‘Kismet’

There will be no Kismet in Johnstown, Pa. This week the Richland School District canceled February’s high school student production of the play.

The 1953 musical is the story of a wily beggar-poet; his unruly, beautiful daughter; and the handsome caliph who falls in love with her at first glance.

Kismet is adapted from that collection of folk tales known as Arabian Nights, with a score drawn from the music of Alexander Borodin.

Kismet won the Tony Award for Best Musical. High school groups often perform the show because the songs can be lush and funny, there are good parts for both boys and girls, and the costumes can be colorful, florid, flowing — and cover students from head to toe. Unlike the musical Hair.

“Kismet” is set in ancient Baghdad, a time historians call the Islamic Golden Age. Johnstown is in western Pennsylvania. Flight 93 flew right over our heads, school Superintendent Thomas Fleming Jr. explains. United Airlines Flight 93, of course, plowed into the ground nearby on September 11, 2001 after the hijackers were overpowered by the passengers and crew. They died to keep the plane from crashing into the U.S. Capitol. So, it’s understandable that people might be a little more sensitive perhaps to the play’s content, Mr. Fleming told the told the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat. He said several people had complained because “Kismet” features Muslim characters; the 10-year anniversary of Flight 93′s crash had just passed. Mr. Fleming says he simply doesn’t want his young students to have to face controversy and criticism.