Another OBH roundup

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.

Manwich and Beefaroni as portmanteaus

My “Grocery store semiotics” posting looked briefly at two canned-food preparations: Manwich and Beefaroni. Manwich: “a canned sloppy joe sauce … The can contains seasoned tomato sauce that is added to cooked ground beef in a skillet” to yield a filling for hamburger buns. And Beefaroni: “pasta with beef in tomato sauce”, essentially a ground beef casserole in a can. Both names are portmanteaus, and both are somewhat opaque in their meaning.

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.

ranunculus

On the heels of my primrose posting, here’s one on another seasonal flower in these parts, the ranunculus (a flower especially of the late winter and early spring). Very pretty in an overblown sort of way, and with an odd etymology.

primroses

As we slide into summer in these parts, the winter-blooming flowers are coming to the end of their season; from this posting, about cyclamens:

Winter in northern California is brightened by a number of flowers that thrive in that season: English primroses, anemones, violas (including pansies), and snapdragons, for example. And cyclamens …

(And cymbidium orchids, discussed here.) Now, while they’re still blooming, some words on primroses (including an etymological essay on the name primrose, which has nothing to do with primness.)

Yet another synthetic compound / back-formation

… this time fitting into my gay sex postings, about the verb spit-roast. I didn’t see it for a while, because the OED seems to treat the verb as a direct compound, from N spit + V roast: ‘roast on a spit’. But N + V compounds are not particularly common — except as the end result of synthetic compounding followed by back-formation.

Synthetic compounds and back-formation: go-go truth-telling

Once I start looking at synthetic compounds and back-formation, new examples pop up all over the place. Two today: the synthetic compounds truth-teller (and truth-telling) and  go-go dancer (and go-go dancing) — from which, the verbs to truth-tell and to go-go dance.

Synthetic compounds and back-formed verbs: rape

From discussions of rape in recent news, the synthetic compounds slut-shaming and victim-blaming — and, no surprise, the back-formed verbs slut-shame and victim-blame.

sugar daddy

From the Castro Biscuit site on 4/3/13:

Only in the Castro Moment of the Day: Straight Dude Seeks Mentor Daddy (by Walyde Palmer)

Making my way home through the Gayborhood I chanced upon a sight not likely seen in to many other places in the world other than SF’s Castro: a married, straight dude holding a sign announcing he seeks a succesful(sic) Sugar Daddy for help and advice.

I’ll talk about the compound sugar daddy in a while, but first more of the story, which focuses on the matter of sexuality. (Hat tip to Ned Deily.)

buck-rake

From Maureen Dowd’s NYT op-ed column (“Can We Get Hillary Without the Foolery?”) today:

She was supposed to go off to a spa, rest and get back in shape after her grueling laps around the world. But instead she’s a tornado of activity, speaking at global women’s conferences in D.C. and New York; starting to buck-rake on the speaking circuit; putting out a video flipping her position to support gay marriage; and signing a lucrative deal for a memoir on world affairs — all as PACs spring up around her, Bill Clinton and Carville begin to foment, and Chelsea lands on the cover of this week’s Parade, talking about how “unapologetically and unabashedly” biased she is about her mother’s future.

I was stopped short for a while by buck-rake, but then I figured it out: buck-raking is attested, so buck-rake could be a back-formation from it; and muckrake / muckraking is probably involved, so there’s likely to be a portmanteau with buck ‘dollar’ in there.