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.

Cattions

On AZBlogX, amended images from male photographers, amended by having captions added and B. Kliban cat stickers as well — hence the portmanteau name cattion (cat + caption), pronounced /kǽtʃǝn/, for the form. Two sets so far: 12 photos from Michael Taubenheim (some of them dick shots), 15 from Benno Thoma (none actually X-rated, but none with much of a linguistic point).

 

 

Plantanimals

Today’s Rhymes With Orange, with an extraordinary plant-animal hybrid, accompanied by a portmanteau name:

This is recognizably a daffodil with giraffe properties; in a compound, it’s a giraffe daffodil.

More swarmanteaus

In a recent posting, I noted the portmanteau — or, possibly, use of a libfix -mageddon — in swarmageddon, as a name for this year’s cicada infestation in the eastern US (and picked up the entertaining shawarmageddon along the way). Now, as I’ve noted before, where there’s a -mageddon, there’s usually a -pocalypse as well. The combination swarm(a)pocalypse seems not to be attested, but this morning on ADS-L David Barnhart reported cicadapocalypse (with the two parts sharing the vowel /ǝ/ in pronunciation, the letter A in spelling). And there’s cicadageddon as well.

On the -mageddon watch

Rob Partington points me to recent stories on the 17-year cicadas, under the heading swarmageddon (swarm + Armageddon) — a topical portmanteau. That led me to the preposterous shawarmageddon, involving the food shawarma.

Tacolicious

On Wednesday the Stanford QUEST group (queer staff and faculty) had our monthly happy hour, this time at Tacolicious in Palo Alto, a Mexican restaurant that not long ago replaced the Indian fusion restaurant Mantra (which succeeded the Japanese fusion restaurant Higashi West, which succeeded Old Uncle Gaylord’s Kosher Ice Cream Parlour, which I remember fondly from 30 years ago). (Restaurant turnover in Palo Alto is scandalous.)

Tacolicious is not just a taco place, but something trendier and more inventive. And crowded. And very noisy (probably by design, since the conversion from Mantra involved tearing out the entire interior of the restaurant and installing lots of reflective surfaces; noisy makes a restaurant “hot”).

This posting is going to be about the restaurant’s name. But first more on the place itself.

Nick Danger: an appreciation

My iTunes woke me this morning with “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye” (from Firesign Theatre’s How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All (1969)). It’s packed full of playfulness, silliness, and absurdity, much of it linguistic.

Brief mention: a portmant

A portmant is a clipped portmanteau. There aren’t all that many of them, but here’s one that came to my attention today. It starts with the portmanteau zoobiquity, a somewhat over-clever (and opaque, but certainly memorable) combination of zoo + ubiquity. And goes on to zoob.

B.C. portmanteau

From Victor Steinbok, this B.C. cartoon (from 4/16/13) by Johnny Hart:

This is intended to be a portmanteau both verbally and visually. Verbally, Mercedes-Benz overlapping with benzene. Visually, a combination of the symbol for the Mercedes-Benz company and a simplified version of the carbon ring structure for benzene.

The Sturgeon General

Periodically I’ve posted the Bizarro Sunday Punnies, always a set of three pun panels. Last Sunday’s (#29) led with one that amused me a lot:

The title is a punning portmanteau: sturgeon (the fish) + Surgeon General (of the U.S.). The Surgeon General gives advice on matters of public health, and at least one SG has campaigned aggressively against cigarette smoking. So then we have the pun on smoking (cigarettes) and smoking ‘curing or preserving (food) by exposure to (wood) smoke’, a procedure often applied to sturgeon flesh.