frankenstuff

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:40 PM -0400 7/27/00, Kathleen Miller wrote:
>There was a discussion a while back about frankenfood and Paul
>Lewis' coinage. Jesse said it made it into RHWCD, which mentions
>frankentomato.
>
>Any others that you're are aware of that have taken hold? I've found
>Frankenscience, -seeds, -athletes, and -fish, but none of them seem
>to be as wide spread, or they're just plays on "frankenfood."
>
Frankenfish is relatively frequent, actually:  well over a thousand
hits on www.google.com.  There's also the occasional "Frankenbeef" or
"Frankenmeat" (genetically altered, of course) and even one
"Franken-opener" at a hacker web site
(http://www.procooling.com/html/page11420.html), but the form is
still only partially productive.  I was hoping someone might have
coined "Frankensense" by now (this would be sort of the opposite of
common sense; maybe as a description of politicians' motivations for
a creatively stupid piece of legislation) but alas virtually all the
web sites I can find for this seem to be unintended misspellings of
the traditional Christmas gift.  (You can tell because "myrrh" gets
an equally...orthographically challenged rendering.)

Larry Horn