Subway's Poor Portmanteau Choice

Am I the only one who has a problem with the name of Subway's new menu item?

There are just too many options for the phonetic realization of the neologism.

To start with, where are the syllable breaks? Is it fla/ti/za or flat/iz/a? Which syllable should be stressed? Also, if it is made to rhyme with pizza, it sounds like either fla/teets/a or flat/eets/a, depending on the syllable break.

I get that it is a portmanteau of flatbread + pizza. But it sure is a phonetically problematic portmanteau.

I'd Like a Syllable and an India Ale, Please

I'm not really in the mood for a Samuel Smith's, so...

make it a Wig Top IA.

As explained at Wikipedia - India Pale Ale or IPA is a beer style within the broader category of pale ale. It was first brewed in England in the 19th century. The first known use of "India pale ale" is an advertisement in the Liverpool Mercury in 1835. It was also referred to as "pale ale as prepared for India", "India Ale", "pale India ale" or "pale export India ale".

While IA may not be a common initialism for the beer style, I can't help but think about beer whenever I pass the above pictured store due to the familiarity of IPA as an initialism combined with the unusual bullet point insertions in the store's name and the recent influx of oddly named beers.

Yellowpages.com lists the store's name as Wigtopia Beauty Supply. Even without the addition of "beauty supply", when the bullet points are removed it is much more clear that the store name is meant to be verbalized as one word with syllable breaks like so: /wɪg.to.pi:ʌ/. This was also confirmed when I phoned the store and the clerk answered as such.

Perhaps the store owners designed the signage to be phonetically playful. Wigs do top the head and they probably do sell what they consider to be the ideal wigs, thus: /wɪg.tɑp.i:ʌ/.

Regardless, I can't do it; I will continue to read the store name as two words and an initialism: /wɪg tɑp aɪ eɪ/.

India Ale image here
Wig Top image from Yelp 

Yummy (?) Portmanteaus

Speaking of portmanteaus, if it wasn't for Yum! Brands I would not have chuckled even once during the excruciatingly painful viewing experience of "Young Adult".

"KenTaco-Hut" anyone?

This fast food combo may be old news to many; however, I can't think of one in Michigan so this triple portmanteau (and especially how it was verbalized in the movie) cracked me up.

Image credit

Portmanteau Bumper Stickers

In a post a week or so ago I mentioned my new hobby of Geocaching. Look what happens when a Geocaching sticker is added to a linguistics sticker -

These two bumper stickers need not be alien. And, they actually portmanteau quite well.

Geo Sticker

Ling Sticker

Monkeying Around With Words

Portmanteau brought to you by Back of the Cereal Box

Rusticated From Bollywood

I sure hope the writer, director, producer and actors from 3 idiots are never suspended from the Indian film industry.


I just watched one of the best movies I have seen in...I don't even know how long. I normally get antsy watching movies that are longer than an hour an a half or so; not the case with this movie that was almost three hours short. My teenage son, while complaining about the subtitles and playing a game on his laptop, started to half-watch the movie with me and within the first five minutes he set everything aside to give it his full attention. We laughed and cried together and enjoyed every minute of this delightfully unconventional, joyfully sentimental and extremely intelligent comedy.

Here is the summary from Netflix:
While attending one of India's premier colleges, miserable engineering students and best friends Rancho (Aamir Khan), Farhan (Madhavan) and Raju (Sharman Joshi) struggle to beat their school's draconian system, which, in their eyes, unfairly values grades over creativity. Loosely based on Chetan Bhagat's best-selling novel Five Point Someone, this entertaining Bollywood comedy also stars Kareena Kapoor and Boman Irani.

rus·ti·cate
v. rus·ti·cat·ed, rus·ti·cat·ing, rus·ti·cates
v.intr.
To go to or live in the country.
v.tr.
1. To send to the country.
2. Chiefly British To suspend (a student) from a university.
3. To cut or shape (masonry blocks) so as to create a bold textured look, often by beveling the edges to form deep-set joints while leaving the central face rough-hewn or carved with various pointed or channeled patterns.

Bollywood
n
(Performing Arts) Informal
a. the Indian film industry
b. (as modifier) a Bollywood star
[from Bo(mbay) + (Ho)llywood]

Neologisms of Late - Sofalizing

A dear friend recently brought a new word to my attention, on Facebook of all places. Here it is with its MacMillan Dictionary Buzzword definition:

sofalizing also sofalising
noun [uncountable]
the activity of using the Internet or other electronic devices to socialize with people from home, rather than meeting them face to face

sofalize also sofalise
verb [intransitive]
sofalizer also sofaliser
noun [countable]

'Millions of us have given up socialising for "sofalising" – talking to pals via phones and the net instead of going out.'
THE SUN 11TH NOVEMBER 2010

'Researchers claim nearly a quarter of us sofalise every night – rather than go to a pub, club or village hall to meet people face to face, we plop down on the sofa … spending hours updating our profiles on social networking sites, chatting online or Tweeting …'
DAILY MAIL 15TH NOVEMBER 2010

'There is even an army of "extreme sofalisers" – the three per cent who spend a staggering 25 hours or more each week talking to friends via electronic devices.'
TELEGRAPH, UK 30TH NOVEMBER 2010

The word reminded me of this xkcd comic.


I especially love the mouseover on the xkcd site:

I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone "I'm from the internet", instead of laughing they just ask "Oh, what part?"

Speaking of xkcd, here are some excerpts from the About Page that I got a kick out of* (out of which I got a kick?)

What does XKCD stand for?

It's not actually an acronym. It's just a word with no phonetic pronunciation -- a treasured and carefully-guarded point in the space of four-character strings.

Is xkcd translated?

Translating humor is often difficult between groups that speak the same language, let alone totally different cultures. So it's inherently a hard problem. However, a reader does translate xkcd strips into Spanish, which can be found at es.xkcd.com.

How do I write "xkcd"? There's nothing in Strunk and White about this.

For those of us pedantic enough to want a rule, here it is: The preferred form is "xkcd", all lower-case. In formal contexts where a lowercase word shouldn't start a sentence, "XKCD" is an okay alternative. "Xkcd" is frowned upon.

Stretching Snowmen

Spotted this on Arnold Zwicky's Blog a week or so ago and I couldn't resist sharing.



Zwicky points out that, "human and snowman aren’t really parallel, historically, morphologically, or prosodically", but I still thoroughly enjoyed the analogy even if it was a linguistic stretch.

Oddly related: I just returned from a walk on which I saw a croquet game set up in the snow on a neighbor's front yard. I wonder if they enjoyed their snoquet match?