San Diego was recently named the top philanthropic city in the U.S. by “Charity Navigator,” which analyzes and ranks the nation’s nonprofits. The word philanthropy derives from the Greek phil “loving” and anthropos, “humanity.” We’re lucky to live and move and have our beings in such an open-hearted and humanity loving community.
In the wake of the fabulously popular and profitable Comic-Con, which recently energized our great city, let us remember the most famous of all quotations ever to emerge from a comic strip. I’m talking about the pronouncement declaimed by Walt Kelly’s immortal possum, Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and he is us!”
Some grammar mavens would argue that the us in Pogo’s statement is cast in the wrong pronoun case. We is legalistically the correct pronoun form for a predicate nominative, but it would be sacrificing poetry on the altar of grammatical purism to recast the sentence as “We have met the enemy, and he is we!”
The movie “Ironman 3,” based on the Ironman comic books, recently snagged more bazillions of dollars for the incredibly successful franchise. But lest we forget, the first Ironman was a woman. That’s because the Fe in the word female is the symbol for iron: hence, “iron + man.”
How tweet it is. The June 2013 update of the venerable Oxford English Dictionary officially recognizes the word tweet as both a noun (a post on Twitter) and a verb (to post to a social-media site).
Another word that has entered some online dictionaries is breastaurant, a shiny, new noun describing eateries at which the waitresses wear revealing outfits. While restaurants generally experienced a decline during the Great Recession, breastaurants have yielded remarkable profits. That’s why two Celtic-themed incarnations of The Tilted Kilt have so prominently joined Hooters in San Diego.
Breastaurant is a perfect example of a blend, or portmanteau, word, in which the end or the entirety of one word (in this case, breast) is melded with the beginning of a second word (in this case rest/aurant). Other recent blends include ginormous (giant + enormous), groupon (group + coupon), staycation (stay + vacation), webinar (web + seminar) and sexting (sex + texting).
I myself have never dined at a breastaurant, but my friends tell me about these establishments and swear that they are primarily attracted thereto by the flavorful and healthful cuisine.
Speaking of breastaurants, a few years ago, the manager at a Panama City, Fla., Hooter’s offered what sounded like “a Toyota” to the waitress who sold the most beer over the course of a monthlong promotion. One Jodee Berry came out first in the contest and believed that she had won a new car as her prize.
It turned out that the restaurant’s manager was pulling an April Fool’s prank. Berry was led blindfolded to the restaurant’s parking lot to claim her reward. When her blindfold was removed, she saw that her booty was actually an action figure of the little green, pointy-eared guy from the “Star Wars” movies. In other words, the prize turned out to be a $40 toy Yoda.
Yuck, yuck, chuckle, chuckle, bwa har har, but Berry was not amused by the linguistic hoax and sued for damages and attorneys’ fees. She won her case and was able to pick out any Toyota she wished to acquire. Happy driving, Jodee — in your Toyota, not your toy Yoda.
Mega-selling J.K. Rowling was recently outed as the author of “The Cuckoo’s Calling,” under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith, giving the crime novel a colossal sales boost. That’s because Rowling wrote that series about a certain boy wizard and his friends and antagonists.
I ask you, then: What do you get when you cross a gorilla with a clay-worker? A hairy potter, of course!
Please send your questions and comments about language to richard.lederer@utsandiego.com