Libfix report for May 2016

Two bits of creative morphology I’ve been seeing around the city:

• Lime-a-rita: This trademark (of Anheuser-Busch InBev) isn’t just a redundant way to refer to a margarita (which has a lime base—a non-lime “margarita” is a barbarism), but rather a “light American lager” blended with additional lime-y-ness. I have to imagine this coinage, albeit rather corporate, was helped along by the existence of the truncation ‘rita, occasionally used in casual conversation by their most comitted devotees.
• -otto: I first came aware of this through pastotto, the suggested name for a dish of pasta (perhaps penne), fried in olive oil and butter and then cooked in stock, like risotto; according to popularizer Mark Bittman, this is an old trick. Now, that one looks a bit blend-y, given that the ris- part of risotto is really a reference to arborio rice, and that the final -a in the base pasta appears to be lost in the combination. But not so much for barleyotto, which satisfies even the most stringent criteria for libfix-hood.