The evolution of Zippytainment
Today's
Zippy strip takes us
from entertainment to infotainment to confrontainment to
laundrotainment. The words are all attested, and in rapidly
descending frequency in the order Bill Griffith gives them.
First the cartoon:
I get almost 200 million raw Google webhits for "entertainment"; over a
million hits for "infotainment", including
a Wikipedia page
(there are also over a million for "edutainment" and again
a Wikipedia page);
61 hits for "confrontainment" (two below); and only 2 for
"laundrotainment" (both below). The rate of descent in frequency
ratios isn't constant -- the ratios are 200:1, 16,393:1, and 30.5:1 --
but Griffith certainly has the words in the right order.
confrontainment
The second, of course, is the growth of so-called "trash TV" - or, as
one of its principals calls it, "confrontainment." (
link)
[about Andy Kaufman] A pioneer of the "confrontainment" style of
comedy, his stand-up routines and professional wrestling appearances
often transformed audiences into riotous, ... (
link)
laundrotainment
Over the last several years, this "bigtainment bang" has had a profound
impact on virtually every one of our society's business and social
institutions. Consumers increasingly expect and are drawn toward
infotainment, edutainment, eatertainment and retailtainment. When a
coin-operated Laundromat installs big-screen TVs, a bar and a cool kids
play area, it too becomes an entertainment attraction.
Laundrotainment. (
link)
I threw out my TV....
and now I watch my front-loading washer.
Now that's laundrotainment!
by Don Quixote on Wed Aug 17, 2005 at 08:02:29 PM PST (
link)
When I searched for "laundrotainment", Google asked if I meant
"wondertainment" -- 109 raw hits for that one, many for the
first below:
Wondertainment: Bird Adoption and
Placement Center [for exotic birds] (
link)
Master illusionists, Skibber & Zip present Wondertainment every
evening and Sunday afternoon on the Fountain Plaza Stage. (
link)
Then I started finding oddities:
That's Entrail-Tainment!
What's worse -- getting tortured at Abu Ghraib, or volunteering for Fear
Factor?
by George Smith
August 3rd, 2004 9:50 AM (
Village
Voice)
eater-tainment noun. A restaurant that
also offers entertainment such
as wall-mounted memorabilia, video displays, or live music.
Example Citation:
"Eater-tainment has become the industry buzzword for restaurants such
as Hard Rock Cafe, Dave & Buster's and Jillian's, which bring
together dining and play under the same roof."
--Lornet Turnbull, "Theme Restaurants Looking for a Hook," The Columbus
Dispatch, August 21, 1999 (
WordSpy)
WordSpy supplied links to "irritainment" and "promo-tainment".
There was obviously a big "tainment" iceberg here. Googling on
"tainment" pulled up the items above, and also (in the first hundred
hits. in alphabetical order):
archi-tainment [architecture]
auto-tainment [automated robots; automobiles]
Centertainment [a booking office]
China-tainment [entertainment in China]
clutter-tainment [having fun de-cluttering]
computainment
digitainment
Doy-tainment [guy called Doy on movies]
econo-tainment [entertainment on a budget]
eco-tainment
etainment, eTainment, E-tainment
extra-tainment [a variety of uses]
histo-tainment [history]
Inter-tainment [internet]
itainment, iTainment
M-tainment, m-tainment, mtainment [mobile entertainment; MTV]
m-tertainment [mobile entertainment]
nano-tainment
philanthro-tainment
Politi-tainment [(black) politics]
promo-tainment [a promotional ad presented as a form of entertainment]
psycho-tainment [psychology]
retail-tainment
retro-tainment
teletainment
torture-tainment
(My usual caution: I'm not proposing to inventory all occurrences of
the phenomenon. The point is only to demonstrate that -
tainment is versatile and
popular. People love to play with language.)
In any case,
Zippy has, once
again, touched on matters of linguistic interest, in this case, the
spread of -
tainment (from
entertainment) as a
compound-forming element. The strips often take off on
linguistics and linguistic phenomena, as we've noted here six times so
far:
snowclones
X's World (It's X's world; we just live in it):
here
The New Y:
here
and
here
other topics
non-standard pronunciations:
here
Chomsky; language as music:
here
odd words from old comic strips:
here
I have a pile of other linguistics-related
Zippy cartoons stashed in my iPhoto
files (along with some art-related ones that I love but aren't really
relevant to Language Log [yes, I know that's a somewhat odd
coordination, of a type we've looked
at
here before, but on re-reading it I've decided I like it and I'm
sticking with it]), and now that I have a lot of fresh storage space
for publicly accessible files, I'll assemble some
Zippy retrospectives on
language. Stay tuned.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at January 20, 2007 01:57 PM