Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Having posted one Emily Flake cartoon (on decimate, here), I thought to check out some of her other work. (That’s her real name, by the way.) Mostly focused on situations rather than language, but here are three varied examples of interest to me.

A nice strip on catcall, with gender role inversion:

NOAD2 on catcall:

noun
a shrill whistle or shout of disapproval, typically one made at a public meeting or performance.

• a loud whistle or a comment of a sexual nature made by a man to a passing woman.

verb [ no obj. ]
make such a whistle, shout, or comment: they were fired for catcalling at women.

ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: from cat¹ [the creature] + call, originally denoting a kind of whistle or squeaking instrument used to express disapproval at a theater.

There’s a social history here that might be worth looking into.

Then a strip on academic life:

Academic nightmare time.

Finally.one just for me, ’cause it’s about underwear (and cartoon superheroes):

Now, about the cape …

This entry was posted on February 7, 2013 at 7:33 pm and is filed under Academic life, Gender and sexuality, Language and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Underwear. 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.