Linguist Heidi Harley has compiled her fourth annual Simpsons linguistic joke collection, "Beyond Beyond Beyond 'Beyond Embiggens and Cromulent.'" To borrow a phrase, it's a treasure-trove of culture and multi-culture!
Naturally, I love this citation:
Category: Haplology¹
Homer has drunk Moe's 'forget-me-not' drink, and has 24-hour amnesia. He's visiting the Memory Recovery Institute ("We do not do MRIs"), where Professor Frink is welcoming him.
Professor Frink: Mr. Simpson, I have built a device that will enable you to explore your memories. The science was easy, but now I've got the hard part -- coming up with the name!
Homer: How about the "Dejà-ViewMaster"?
Frink: Ahh…
Homer: "Remembrance of Things Fast"?
Frink: Umm..
Homer: "The Rememberererer"?
Frink: We don't need to come up with the name now.
And also this one:
Category: Novel derivational morphology
Homer builds a rollercoaster and names it the "Zoominator".
The post includes links to Heidi's three previous roundups. And here's a link to my own June 2007 post about fictitious brand names in The Simpsons. I'm working on a sequel!
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¹Haplology (the loss of one of two identical or similar syllables in a word). IANAL (I Am Not A Linguist--and also "I Anal"), but I thought "Remembererer" was an example of reduplication.
I'm learning more about the English language from reading about descriptions of non-English than reading about descriptions of real English. How can that be?
Posted by: Nick Tata | March 17, 2008 at 01:51 PM
rererereduplication.
Posted by: goofy | March 17, 2008 at 04:46 PM
A footnote to your Simpsons Brand-o-Rama posting, which Heidi links to: Junior Skeptic magazine actually does exist; it's bound into the back pages of Skeptic magazine.
Posted by: John Cowan | March 20, 2008 at 09:27 PM