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Fun Is Bowling

Today’s Zippy, mostly about the Ten Pin Louisville, but with a point of linguistic interest:

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This is of course a real place; Griffith doesn’t make such things up.

The real place:

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From their website:

The huge, iconic letters might lead visitors to think that Ten Pin Louisville is actually called “Fun is Bowling,” while the smiley faces on each end of the lettering suggest a 1970s motif at the St. Matthews bowling alley. Ten Pin Louisville is a bowler’s bowling alley. The 40-lane complex includes a working Pro Shop where regulars can get minor adjustments made, or engage in a conversation about the potential advantage gained with a new wrist brace.

(Burgers and beer are also available.)

The linguistic question is the difference between Bowling is fun (a simple assertion about bowling) and Fun is bowling (a much more complex assertion).

This entry was posted on January 28, 2014 at 6:36 am and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Semantics, Syntax. 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.

2 Responses to “Fun Is Bowling”

  1. Big Mongo Says:
    January 28, 2014 at 10:40 pm | Reply

    Cool… Zippy’s spin on Joseph Conrad’s “Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off.”

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

    […] Here’s a Zippy that advances the story almost entirely through extended inserted text, discussed in my posting “Fun is bowling” of 1/28/14: […]

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