bigger

Today’s One Big Happy has Ruthie and James at cross-purposes on the semantics of bigger:

The adjective big and its comparative form bigger are understood with reference to some scale S: X is big if it’s towards the high end of S, and X is bigger than Y if it’s higher on S than Y is. What distinguishes Ruthie and James is the S that they’re appealing to. For Ruthie, S is the ordering of natural numbers 1, 2, 3, … (which makes sense in the strip, since the context is a discussion of arithmetic), but for James, it’s the ordering of written symbols according to their physical size.

Leave a Reply


Discover more from Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading