How ’bout them Cubbies?

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.)

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.

Penguins and tuxedos

Today’s Bizarro plays on the association between penguins and tuxedos — with penguins in t-shirts and open-necked shirts instead of tuxedos:

  (#1)

There are other cartoons about penguins and tuxedos (and other cartoons about Casual Fridays, though I won’t look at them here); in fact, there are vast numbers of cartoons about penguins, which are easily anthropomorphized (they walk, or waddle, on two legs, and have arm-like, flipper-like wings) and are fascinatingly anomalous creatures (flightless birds that feed underwater and live in extreme climates and terrain). They are also gregarious and gather in large numbers, leading to cartoons about the difficulty of telling one penguin from another.

Now some words about actual penguins, and how some of them can easily be seen as wearing tuxedos, leading to altered photos of penguins *in* tuxedos and penguins as the emblems of tuexo rental stores; about tuxedos; and about Casual Fridays. Then a selection of penguin cartoons that haven’t already appeared on this blog.

pinnies

In my e-mail a little while ago, a Princeton University Store ad offering Princeton pinnies — one illustrated here:

The text:

The weather is finally starting to warm up and we have the perfect lightweight summer staple for Tigers everywhere – the Princeton pinnie! With a nice loose fit and 2-ply mesh these are sure to keep you cool in all senses of the word! Did we mention, they’re all REVERSIBLE and available in several different styles?!

The term pinnie for such a garment was new to me. But it’s been around for a while, though primarily in British usage.

Context, jargon, and clipping

From an article in Details magazine for April 2013, p. 64, a quote given here without context:

“The house doesn’t even have a complete back. We had to be careful about the budget and determined that we could add the top of the roof in post.”

Add … in post is baffling without the context. Things get a bit clearer when I tell you that the house in question is the ominous Victorian house next to the motel on the set of the new A&E tv series Bates Motel (a prequel to the movie Psycho), and the speaker is Mark Freeborn, the production designer for the series. But that gets you only part of the way; you also have to work out that post is a clipping of post-production in the jargon of filmmaking and video production. And of course you need to know what post-production refers to as a technical term in this world.

Commando no more

[TMI Warning: The following posting contains information, opinion, or reflection that some readers might find uncomfortably or unwelcomely personal, private, or intimate in topic or content: too much information, as the saying goes. As a general observation, I’m willing to go almost anywhere in my postings, including some places that some readers don’t want to go.]

When I went into the hospital for my hip replacement operation, I was told to bring loose-fitting clothes. The instructions could have been clearer, but I suspect the medical staff didn’t want to alarm us about how limited and difficult my movements were going to be (they’re really focused on being optimistic and encouraging). I did come prepared with boxer shorts in a generous size (bought specially for this purpose; I’ve been a briefs guy for many decades), but it hadn’t occurred to me that jeans — or, in fact, any ordinary pants or trousers — would be an almost impossible ordeal to get on and off. On the other hand, I’d been living with high-class slippers, very easy to get on and off, as shoes for some time (note on them in a moment). In the end, I left the hospital in the boxers and slippers, plus a t-shirt and a bathrobe. T-shirt, boxers, and slippers became my basic costume for a while, and visitors entered into an unspoken agreement to think of the boxers as short pants instead of underwear.

Viewed that way, I had already gone commando, in pants with no underwear. Then came the sweatpants, and I definitely went commando.

Sexual clippings

Reported by Mark Mandel on ADS-L yesterday, ace for asexual ‘person who feels no sexual attraction to others’ (independent of feeling romantic interest) — a clipping of the base word, making the term roughly comparable in form to the clippings bi for bisexual, homo for homosexual, and hetero for heterosexual (though these items are not fully comparable in tone or style). Ace stands out because, unlike the others, it’s not a prefix on its own, but rather a prefix (a-) plus the following consonant.

Lesbo brides

(Not about language, except for the clipping of lesbian to lesb-, with the affective suffix -o added on.)

Continuing the brides collages, here are four collages from another series, Lesbo Brides.

No PMNs seen

The final lab report on the synovial fluid that was aspirated on October 24th, which came in during the night, was terse:

Gram Stain: No PMNs seen. No organisms seen.

Culture: No growth 5 days. No Anaerobes isolated.

Clearly a case in which no news is good news: no organisms and no anaerobes is a good thing; the lab work was undertaken, after all, in the hope that nothing would be found. Surgery to replace my right hip, now scheduled for the 14th, can go on.

But what are PMNs?