Today’s Rhymes With Orange:
gentrify / tentrify.
Archive for February, 2014
Playful -ify
February 23, 2014Cultural allusions in the comics
February 22, 2014
Yet another pun
February 22, 2014From Mother Goose and Grimm:
The relevant senses of the verb spoil, from NOAD2:
[ no obj. ] (of food) become unfit for eating: I’ve got some ham that’ll spoil if we don’t eat it tonight.
harm the character of (a child) by being too lenient or indulgent: the last thing I want to do is spoil Thomas | (as adj. spoiled): a spoiled child.
Two Pearls
February 22, 2014
Sociocultural allusions
February 21, 2014An assignment for the Stanford students in the Language in the Comics course involved the Zippy the Pinhead cartoon on the brain here. The students didn’t like this cartoon; they didn’t understand it (well, Zippy specializes in the absurd). It turned out that at least part of the problem was that the students had no idea who Joan Rivers was. Once again, the necessity of background knowledge!
Another allusive pun
February 20, 2014
Caption exercise
February 20, 2014Today’s Bizarro, first in a captionless version:
(#1)
This is funny as it stands, though it requires considerable sociocultural knowledge to understand (I very much get doubt that my soon-to-be ten-year-old grand-daughter would get it).
Women’s comics
February 19, 2014An AP story from the 16th: “Pa. exhibit traces history of female comic artists” by Kevin Begos:
It took a war to let the country’s female comic book artists break character.
A new exhibit at Pittsburgh’s Toonseum is celebrating the history of female comic artists, including those who began laying the groundwork 100 years ago and the female artists of the 1940s, when World War II sent many male artists overseas.
Embedded PP
February 17, 2014Today’s Bizarro:
PPs within PPs. All are postnominal modifying PPs that are (roughly) equivalent to postnominal relative clauses:
the memo which was about the meeting which was about the conference call which was about the memo which was on how to schedule meetings
So these postnominal PPs have been referred to as “reduced relative clauses”.
Another word avalanche
February 17, 2014Today’s Pearls Before Swine, with yet another word avalanche:
A chain of rhymes or near-rhymes. With Rat, as so often, upbraiding the cartoonist. I’m irrationally fond of these.