Arnold Zwicky's Blog

A sudden avalanche of linuistically interesting cartoons, on a variety of topics.

Word confusion. On Facebook, via David Preston, this Rubes cartoon:

(#1)

rapture / raptor: near-homonyms, so open for confusion.

(On Rubes, see here.)

Then three cartoons this morning: a Zits, a Bizarro, a Rhymes.

Zits: band names. Freely chosen or invented proper names make a rich topic of investigation. The enormous number of rock bands provide an especially nice source of data. Here’s a Zits on the subject:

(#2)

Bizarro labradoodle. The labradoodle is a canine cross, between a labrador retriever and a poodle; the name is a portmanteau. Here’s a Bizarro that pulls out the doodle as an independent element, referring to a cartoon:

(#3)

Rhymes With Orange on tone in e-mails. It’s notoriously difficult to communicate emotional attitudes on-line. Hence this cartoon:

(#4)

Deliberately marking sarcasm is a somewhat self-defeating strategy; sarcasm and irony are normally communicated indirectly.

This entry was posted on January 21, 2014 at 2:37 am and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Names, Portmanteaus, Sarcasm and irony, Word confusions. 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.