Arnold Zwicky's Blog

A cartoon in the latest (June 8th/15th) New Yorker by Jason Adam Katzenstein:

(#1)

It’s the wine talking is used to confess something you might not have said if you hadn’t drunk some wine. But it’s a formulaic expression, so it can be deployed in other ways, for instance to introduce talk about wine.

In the cartoon, the wine is literally talking.

I haven’t found much on the artist, but here’s a particularly silly cartoon of his from last year:

(#2)

It’s all about confessions.

This entry was posted on June 6, 2015 at 5:33 am and is filed under Formulaic language, 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.