Arnold Zwicky's Blog

In Zits, yesterday and today, on what people say and what listeners (well, Jeremy) make of that:

(#1)

(#2)

Two different phenomena here. In #1, Jeremy calculates the consequences of what Sara is saying and concludes that he should escape. In #2, Jeremy suffers from selective attention, editing out the parts of what his father said that he doesn’t want to hear (not unlike the many cartoons of the form: “what we say – what dogs hear”).

xx

This entry was posted on January 23, 2015 at 4:33 am and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics. 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.