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Bilingual wordplay

Today’s Scenes From a Multiverse:

It’s the first two panels, with a play on the name of the supreme leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un — interpreted as if the un was French for ‘one’. So after Kim Jong Un comes Kim Jong Deux.

This entry was posted on August 7, 2013 at 8:16 am and is filed under Language play, Linguistics in the comics. 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.

4 Responses to “Bilingual wordplay”

  1. Bob Richmond Says:
    August 7, 2013 at 8:30 am | Reply

    I pronounce it Kim Jong Eeeeuuuw. (That actually is a bit closer to the original Korean vowel.)

  2. John Baker Says:
    August 7, 2013 at 4:16 pm | Reply

    And in the previous comic he announced that he is “the clone of Kim Jong Un! Good Un!” The wordplay works pretty well in print, but not so well when spoken.

  3. arnold zwicky Says:
    August 8, 2013 at 5:51 am | Reply

    From Éamonn McManus on Facebook:

    If I were an insufferable pedant I would note that the first to bear a name is called Première or Premier, not Un, even though the subsequent ones are indeed Deux, Trois, etc. But of course I am not, so I won’t.

    Mind you, Kim Jong Un’s father *was* sometimes jokingly or mistakenly called Kim Jong Deux in French since Kim Jong Il can easily be misread that way.

  4. Metatext handout | Arnold Zwicky's Blog Says:
    March 14, 2014 at 6:51 am | Reply

    […] (followed by a bunch of tweets). Discussion of the strip in my posting “Bilingual wordplay of the same day, here. […]

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