Today’s Rhymes With Orange, with a portmanteau:
(#1)
That’s despair + asparagus. This is a stretch as a portmanteau for me, because the accented vowels in the two contributing words are distinct for me: [e] in despair, [æ] in asparagus. For me and some other American speakers — and for virtually all English speakers outside of North America. But for other Americans, the vowels are quite close (with [ɛ] in asparagus) or identical (with [e] in asparagus). This is merry-Mary-marry territory.
Today’s Dilbert:
Wally is conflating passion ‘enthusiasm, zeal’ (as in “passion is necessary for success”) and passion ‘love or desire’ — probably with malice aforethought.
Yesterday’s Dilbert, in which Dilbert confronts his pointy-headed boss:
I’m sorry to say that gamification (a verbing in -ify from the noun game) is not some twisted invention of Scott Adams’s. And then there’s the question of what counts as garbage.
Today’s Pearls Before Swine:
The idiom golden throat ‘a widely admired singing or speaking voice’ is both metonymic (throat for ‘voice’) and metaphorical (golden ‘like gold in value’), but it’s complex enough that someone could not see that. Rat, of course, just turns things to his own ends.
From Benita Bendon Campbell, three more One Big Happy strips: on questions, compound nouns, and tense in nouns. And then, as a bonus, four strips on Ruthie’s interpretations of words.
Today’s Zippy:
Zippy’s been reading the texts on food products, finding deep messages there.
Love the idea of “advanced socioeconomic degrees in … Manwich & Beefaroni Symbology”.
Every day, San Francisco radio station KALW announces notable events for that day. Yesterday (May 13th) we were told that it was National Apple Pie Day (other sources agree with that; almost every day is devoted to some food or another) and also Blame Somone Else Day. An entertaining idea. Unfortunately, I can’t find any source that says Blame Someone Else Day comes on May 13th.
An eCard:
Well, smartass isn’t directly a compound of the adjective smart ’impertinent’ and the noun ass; instead, -ass serves here as an expressive extension of smart (as in sweet-ass ‘really sweet, big-ass ‘really big’, dumb-ass ‘really dumb’, etc.) — note He’s always asking smart-ass / dumb-ass questions — and the extended adjective was then nouned, giving an alternative to smart aleck, smartypants, and in fact the noun smarty.
Today’s Zippy:
So the strip is “about” hair(s), but it’s also “about” How ’bout them Cubbies?
(On a personal hair and holiday note: I’m watching Hairspray for Mothers Day.)
