Arnold Zwicky's Blog

It started with this One Big Happy cartoon, clipped from a newspaper and sent to me by Benita Bendon Campbell:

(#1)

Not a great reproduction, but I couldn’t find the original on-line, so this is a scan from the paper.

In any case, it’s about anaphora, and the possibility of understanding he and him as referring either to Buggsy Crispino or the witch doctor.

In searching for the original, I came across some more OBH strips on language, all less subtle than #1; they turn on Ruthie’s word confusions. In no particular order:

(#2)

Buncher / crowder / grouper. Semantics good, word selection flawed,

(#3)

Circus olé / Cirque du soleil; lobstertrician / obstetrician, fossil arm / false alarm.

(#4)

Thing / thang / thong. Irregular inflection.

This entry was posted on March 28, 2014 at 7:59 am and is filed under Anaphora, Errors, Inflection, Linguistics in the comics, 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.