Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s Calvin and Hobbes:

We have a problem in style and register here. The vocabulary Calvin has for talking about what afflicts him comes from a kind of babytalk — owwy ‘painful’, boo boo ‘small injury’ — so doesn’t get taken seriously. (But note that Calvin’s internal monologue, like his talk to Hobbes on other occasions, is decidedly adult: ailments, sympathy.)

This entry was posted on June 9, 2015 at 5:05 am and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Style and register, Vocabulary. 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.