Arnold Zwicky's Blog

In this morning’s crop of cartoons, a One Big Happy and a Bizarro:

(#1)

(#2)

In #1, Ruthie once again fails, unsurprisingly, to cope with things in a language other than English, in this case the Italian Che bellissima! Ruthie recognizes che as the personal name Kay, so of course bellissima must be a family name.

In #2, we have an outrageous portmanteau smitation, of (the archaic) smite and citation.

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)

This entry was posted on June 25, 2015 at 6:26 am and is filed under Errors, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus. 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.