Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Three Calvin and Hobbes strips (by Bill Watterson), from Melissa Carvell, all on language-related topics (this from the man who gave us “Verbing weirds language”):

Calvin and his mother exhibit a command of a variety of English long gone:

A conversation gone down the garden path, as Hobbes takes “I can’t put it down” to be figurative, but it turns out that Calvin meant it literally:

And another ambiguity, turning on idiomatic vs. literal understandings:

This one has a vivid illustration of the literal understanding of wander, said of someone’s mind (and lose one’s mind).

This entry was posted on August 2, 2012 at 7:21 am and is filed under Ambiguity, Figurative language, Idioms, Language change, Linguistics in the comics, Style and register. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.