if there is one thing metallica fans like us know, it’s that metallica is a portmanteau of metallic + replica. speaking of portmanteaux, here are a few that i have been dreaming up since posting the first list exactly 400 days ago*.
- fauxtest: (faux + protest) when one pretends to object but secretly consents. as in: “i know that you actually want to see the latest rom-com with that curvy starlet, stop fauxtesting.”
- nonline: (not + online) the opposite of online, a synonym of irl. as in: “i have over 400 online friends but only six nonline ones.”
- femine: (feminine + famine) a dearth of females (cf. sausage party)
- purityrannical: (puritanical + tyrant) of the nature of a religiously and politically conservative authoritarian figure
- bar-b-coup: (barbecue + coup) to override your vegetarian friend’s crappy suggestion to meet up at a nasty falafel joint and instead reroute the party to a bitching bbq spot.
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*this is the second post in the misc portmanteax series. posts in this series publish themselves every 400 days. the next post is scheduled for release on october 24, 2011 at which point the mayan gods will have eaten the earth for fourings.
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misc portmanteaux deux
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Women are not the weak, frail little flowers that they are advertised. There has never been anything invented yet, including war, that a man would enter into, that a woman wouldn’t, too.
— Will Rogers (via musingsofaboredmaniac)(via fuckyeahfeminists)
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Speaking of heteronormativity
Can I register a small, non-judgey grammar objection to this term? Despite its relatively recent coinage and re-minting into even more recent currency, it’s a bad construction. A literal definition of its Latin roots would be “making the different normal,” but its intended definition is about heterosexuality, not just hetero-ness generally. In fact a better (or, more literal) construction for the intended sense would be “homonormative,” i.e. making sameness (i.e. the normality of homogeneity, allegiance to heterosexual norms) normal. But really what the coiners were trying to get out would be “heterosexual normativity,” or “normative heterosexuality,” or “heterosexuonormativity” which is a more Germanic portmanteau word than I think we’re willing to tolerate, conversationally speaking.
This post brought to you by me waiting for a fax.
Well then. Can we shorten that to hetnorm? “Stop being so hetnorm, you guys.” “This t-shirt is so hetnorm I want to throw up.” If I tweet this, will it become cool? Do I need to add it to my T9?
(Source: chrismohney)
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Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever.
—— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
oh, I love this. always.
(via champagnecandy)
(Source: knowrq, via champagnecandy)
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That’s Sic
oati:
From a list of words included in the fourteen-page copy-editing style guide for Nicholson Baker’s novel House of Holes, out this month from Simon & Schuster.
asswood
ball-hankie
beardwater
bonky
boobosity
boycone
brimmingness
britneys
cockbrisket
cockitude
crotchal
cuntatious
dickybird
doodle-goo
eggmate
floof
flump
fuckalope
groanroom
hip-jouncing
jizzler
joywave
judder
juicy-lucy
loinstem
lovercream
manslurp
maximus cheeks
murfle; murflement
peeny wanger
pelvisy
pornfume
purseness
scrotatiousness
shudderation
spicetime
splatterment
thrummiest
thumper bean
thundertube
urgie-splurgey
weeperhole[Raunch] :: Readings :: Harper’s Magazine :: August 2011
You guys, this book is bonkers. It’s berserk. Obviously not going to appear on this list—because it’s a proper name—is this wonderful euphemism for, uh, peeny wanger: “Dave angled out his Malcolm Gladwell.” Do take the second to consider Gladwell’s hair.
I’m really into fuckalope and cockitude. Prepare to hear them ALL THE TIME.
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When Kurt Andersen took over as editor of New York Magazine, he wrote a list of all the words he found annoying and told his staff not to use them during his tenure.
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fwarg replied to your post: I am feeling peer pressured to do that question thing.hai alexis, I mees you. tell me your four favorite words?
Oh damn, I have so many actually. I used to keep a word document of words I liked/words I wanted to start using more and I would test myself on them every so often.
Here are four, off the top of my head
Kismet
Catharsis
Succulent
Shorn
I like the retroflex flap, fricatives, affricates and plosives. Words that you really have to make. I don’t want it to roll off my tongue, I want to work for it, move my mouth around, use my tongue. Words that feel full in your mouth, but then the fricative hits and you have to make that snap as the air flow starts back. The only thing I like about phonology and phonetics was getting names for the sounds I liked to feel my mouth make.
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I believe, at a very fundamental level, that words are electrical. The generation of words is an expression of electrical energy. The reason storytelling engages us perhaps more fully than other kinds of communication is because the words in a story can mean in different ways. They contain their opposites. In that scene—‘Swearengen!’ ‘Cocksucker!’—we understand how provisional the meaning of a word is and that its fundamental meaning is contingent upon the energy with which it’s endowed by the speaker. Energy is a gossamer and intangible and variable commodity, and words in a story are more clearly contingent and variable than words in a proof. The highest form of storytelling, it seems to me, is mathematics—where literally the signs contain within themselves the most violent and basic form of energy. Einstein understood that if he was able to sign correctly he would experience the secret of energy. He was telling himself a story with those signs, and he said, ‘All I want to understand is the mind of God.’ Now, I don’t want to understand it; I want to testify to it. I believe that we are all literally part of the mind of God and that our sense of ourselves as separate is an illusion. And therefore when we communicate with each other as a function of an exchange of energy we understand not because of the inherent content of the words but because of how that energy flows. So Dority says, ‘I can’t understand you, Wu. Fucking language. I just can’t do it.’ And what he’s saying is ‘I’m trying. I’m trying.’ And then they work something out.
— I know I’m late to the Deadwood game—six years late, I guess—but this 2005 New Yorker profile of the berserk genius David Milch is incredible. Quoted above is his explication of scene that is mostly two dudes yelling “cocksucker!” at each other’s faces. (via mcnallyjackson)
