Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Yesterday’s political cartoon by Matt Wuerker:

A play on the ambiguity of the noun complex.

First, there’s the sense in President Eisenhower’s warning about “the military-industrial comlex”:

a group or system of different things that are linked in a close or complicated way; a network: a complex of mountain roads. (NOAD2)

Then there’s the sense (also from NOAD2) from psychoanalysis, adapted for ordinary-language use:

Psychoanalysis   a related group of emotionally significant ideas that are completely or partly repressed and that cause psychic conflict leading to abnormal mental states or behavior.

– informal   a disproportionate concern or anxiety about something: there’s no point having a complex about losing your hair.

(Note that Uncle Sam is on the couch of a psychoanalyst who looks a lot like Sigmund Freud.)

Information about Wuerker on this blog, here.

This entry was posted on July 30, 2015 at 9:02 am and is filed under Ambiguity, Linguistics in the comics. 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.