Skip to main content

Poor Frankenstein

Names can get mixed up, too. Real or fictional people can become legends, or end up garbled and forgotten. A classic case is poor Frankenstein. If you're picturing the big lumbering monster with the bolts in his neck ... oops. Frankenstein was the doctor who created the monster. The monster was simply known as "the monster" or "Frankenstein's Monster."

Strangely, "Franken-" has become a prefix on its own. I've heard big ugly things named that way, from a Frankencouch to a Frankenpuppy. I wonder if this was urged along by the old FrankenBerry cereal? Sure is a weird thing to make a prefix out of, especially considering the original Franken- thing was not a monster, but a mad scientist. Now, where does Al Franken fit into all this?

Comments

  1. AnonymousAugust 8, 2010 at 5:10 PM

    A great deal of misunderstanding has arisen from that tale, it seems, besides the name.

    You mentioned "FrankenBerry," and I just stumbled across that character's role in the comic Breakfast of the Gods.:
    http://www.webcomicsnation.com/poyorick/botg/

    Congratulations on the Book of Tentacles! I've written a couple of hundred thousand words about future evolved octopuses, including the poetry for their funeral services. I look forward to reading the collection.

    ===|==============/ Level Head

    ReplyDelete
  2. scott veeApril 23, 2012 at 3:31 PM

    Thanks, Level. Looking back at this now, Fat Albert would be Franken-Al ! The same thing has happened with "Moby". Moby Dick was a really big Dick, I mean whale. (Darn language!) And now you can tack "Moby" onto other things. Like the band Moby Grape. I used to doodle all kinds of "mobies" (I hope that never becomes a word) in my notebooks in high school. I even once made a pillow in a Home Economics class shaped like a flatworm, called ... Moby Worm. Yes, the teacher was appalled, but it met the requirements, so ha.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

why not SQUUUSH?

There is a strange and cartoony clump of words centered around SQUISH, or the idea or sound of squishing things.  This includes SQUUSH, SQUSH, and SQUOOSH, and an Ngram view of these shows all kinds of ups and downs in the noise of word history ... The first of these to appear was SQUSH, around 1830, and it was used in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, chapter 29.  SQUUSH came about in 1850, peaked well below the others in 1970 and is headed down to obscurity these days, while SQUOOSH first gets a blip around 1880 and had a big upturn from 1950 to 2010, but it now sinking as, much to my surprise, SQUSH is taking off. Since these are all verbs, they have the full range of strange-looking endings which would be fun for a Scrabble night: SQUUSHED, SQUUSHES, SQUUSHING, SQUSHED, SQUSHES, SQUSHING, SQUOOSHED, SQUOOSHES, SQUOOSHING and can be turned into adjectives as SQUSHY, SQUUSHY and SQUOOSHY. OMG, it's never ending, there are comparative versions SQUSHIER, SQUUSHIER, SQUOOSHIER an
Post a Comment
Read more

Laser, Maser, Phaser, Taser

Here's a family of words which came from acronyms, and we should be grateful that the full expressions have faded away. Laser comes from "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation". Maser is a less common term, with Microwaves instead of Light -- some stars are known to focus beams of radiation in the microwave part of the spectrum, oddly, it's a useful tracer of water molecules. For phaser (the fictional zap gun of the Star Trek series), there are two known acronyms: "Photon Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation" and "PHASed Energy Rectification". These were probably invented after the fact, in one of the technical manuals. When scripts are being written and brainstormed, the gadgets just have to sound cool. Now, the taser (electronic shock gun) is a funny story. It was named by its inventor Jack Cover in 1969 (or 1972), who was a fan of the Tom Swift sci-fi adventure books. The title "Tom Swift and His Electri
Post a Comment
Read more