The Zippy series on “speechlessness” (in some very extended sense) — #4 in the series was here — continues with spoken or written representations of non-language events:
The first four panels all have pinheads (or Pinheads — I’ve never been sure whether the word should be treated as a common noun, naming a type of person, or as a proper noun, naming an ethnicity or other unique social identity) producing noises, which can be referred to by lexical items in English (there are conventional names, homophonous nouns and verbs in each case, available in both the spoken and written language).
The last panel is somewhat different: the speech balloon for the card-playing pinhead there has calculus formulas in it (the first defining the integral, the second with an equivalence relating the integral and the differential). Do these formulas actually represent what the pinhead is saying, or merely what he is thinking? If the former, just what is he uttering? If the latter, is he visualizing the formulas, or “reading them out” in his head, or thinking imagelessly and speechlessly about them?
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