Fo-Bros (Forgettable Brothers)

Quote:  “You know it’s a grim summer-movie season when mediocre rom-coms starring a Wilson brother open two weeks in a row. ” Movie review of “My Super Ex-Girlfriend” by Dana Stevens in Slate.

Figure of Speech: apocope (a-PO-co-pee), the word compacter.

For all you computer geeks, rom-com means romantic comedy, not  “read-only memory communication.”  The phrase joins two apocopes (“shorten”), a figure that kills the last part of a word.

But rom-com is a particular kind of apocope, and one that’s increasingly popular.  It twins with a rhyming cut-off word, as in SoHo, lit crit (literary criticism), and Ab Fab (“Absolutely Fabulous,” darling).  So Figaro will just have to conjure a new figure:

Henceforth, the term for consecutive rhyming abbreviated words is repcope (REP-cope), as in “repetitive cope.”  Yes, that mixes English with Greek.  But restaurants in London do it successfully, and so will Figaro.

Snappy Answer:  “Mediocre” and “Wilson brother” are redundant.

Comments

[DR]

Repcope is so po-mo. . .

[Figaro]

OK, we give up. Translate "po-mo."

[JMack]

Post modern?

[JMack]

Sorry, I meant 'postmodern'?