Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s Zits:

Here we have a deliberately uncooperative response from Jeremy, who treats his mother’s request entirely literally, rather than thinking “Why is she making this request?” and calculating the reasons for her request and the kind of response she’s looking for. So his answer flouts Grice’s Maxim of Relation (or Relevance), as in this discussion of an earlier Zits. Jeremy is given to evasive uncooperativeness.

Note Jeremy’s facial expression in the first panel, and both facial expressions in the third.

This entry was posted on August 28, 2012 at 9:40 am and is filed under Language of teenagers, Linguistics in the comics, Relevance. 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.