Arnold Zwicky's Blog

From Mike Pope recently, a link to this Leigh Rubin cartoon:

(#1)

The cartoon takes the metaphorical idiom in American English in the doghouse ‘in a ​situation in which someone is ​angry at you for something you did or did not do’ (Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary) and literalizes it, treats it literally.

Three more Rubin cartoons playing with language:

(#2)

Pun on Baskin-Robbins, the name of a chain of ice cream specialty shops, here altered to baskin’ (basking) robins.

(#3)

A fanciful origin story about the Mother Goose rhyme “Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon”, exploiting the ambiguity of moon: the satellite of the earth or (slang) ‘the exposure of the bare buttocks to somene to insult or amuse them’.

(#4)

Playing on the ambiguity of whip: ‘beat with a whip’ or ‘beat (cream, eggs, or other food, typically with a whisk) into a froth’.

This entry was posted on December 20, 2015 at 7:38 am and is filed under Language play, 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.