whipping words

[Laurence Horn]

 From a current TV commercial for, it appears, "Wonderful Pistachios":

A woman dressed in a dominatrix outfit with a pistachio-green bustier
(if that's the right word) holds a coiled whip in her hand and places
a nut on the seat of a straight-back chair. She then stands back at
arm's length from the chair and nut, presumably a pistachio.
Voice-over:

"Dominatrix do it..."

[she unleashes the whip, which neatly cracks the nut in half with a loud snap]

"...on command.  Wonderful Pistachios.  Get Cracking."

The interest is, of course, not just another run-of-the-mill
S&M-infused nut commercial but the reanalysis of "dominatrix" as a
plural. Of what, one wonders--"dominatrick"?  And don't dominatrixes,
or dominatrices, standardly make *others* do things on command rather
than doing things on command themselves?  Clearly, mangling the
morphology is just the first step on that slippery slope...

LH

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