Archive for January, 2016

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Superheroes: two book series and a movie

January 18, 2016

Not involving actual comic books or animations about superhero exploits, and not borrowing specific superheroes from these media, but all very much in the spirit of superhero comics. The first two (written for an audience of 8-to 12-year-olds, or perhaps a bit older) I owe to my grand-daughter Opal, with the help of her mother; the third is a movie (pretty clearly aimed at teenagers) I chanced upon on tv one night.

The line-up: the three books about The Ultra Violets, by Sophie Bell; the five Percy Jackson & the Olympians books by Rick Riordan (and supplementary volumes by him, and movies based on the first two of the books); and the movie Sky High, from Disney.

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Posted in Books, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »

Viking Kids

January 18, 2016

Posted on Facebook yesterday, this entertaining composition:

  (#1)

The caption combines two kinds of word play on the original It takes a village to raise a child: a word exchange, of village and child; and a pun on raise / raze. And it alludes to the reputation of the Vikings as ravaging and pillaging as they move across the countryside.

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Posted in Captions, Linguistics in the comics, Proverbs, Puns, Quotations, Semantics, Slogans, Word exchanges | Leave a Comment »

The undercut

January 18, 2016

A Pinterest page on male haircuts led me to the undercut, a cut I’ve seen but had no name for (but this is a good one). From the Max Mayo site on men’s fashion (2/25/15, “45 Stylish Looks of Undercut Hairstyle”):

2015 would be the year faux-hawk officially died. But instead of dying by way of losing sight of it on the street (remember mullets from the 80s?) faux-hawk became a permanent fixture on today’s hairstyle menu, joining the classic league of buzz cuts, side-parted and the Ivy League.

In 2014, undercut hairstyle dethroned faux-hawk and took over the “Most Popular Hairstyle” crown. The request for the “IT” haircut at barber shops and salons continues to grow 3 years after we first spotted (and then embraced) the trend. The natural progression of the trend has given birth to countless permutations of the original style.

An undercut is short on the sides and full on the top. In a disconnected undercut, the sides are very short and clearly separate from the top; in a faded undercut, the sides blend gradually into the longer top.

Some examples to come, the first featuring male model (and former footballer) John Halls, who will provoke a digression showing him hunky in his underwear (and an undercut). Then a few notes on the faux hawk (or faux-hawk), a ‘false mohawk’.

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Posted in Eggcorns, Errors, Language and the body, Underwear | 2 Comments »

Classless but far from sexless

January 17, 2016

Today from Daily Jocks: a sale on Marcuse wear, including the swim briefs modeled here by Friedrich (in Bondi Blue) and his man Karl (in Vamper Sky):

(#1)

(#2)

Friedrich quips that he and
Karl are exactly the same, he’s the
Bodybuilder model, Karl’s the
Swimmer model — met and mated in a
Historical Materialist t-room on
Ibiza, which boasts the world’s
Cruisiest Marxist colony — found
Marcuse’s unique lines of very
Low-rise committed-Marxist
Swim briefs, embodying
Carnal display and eminent
Fondleability in vigorous
Dialectic.

Notes below the fold…

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Posted in Captions, Phallicity, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

Hunting mammoths in the Arctic

January 17, 2016

… 45,000 ago.

Passed on by Michael Palmer, from PastHorizons: adventures in archeology, “Mammoth injuries indicate humans occupied Arctic earlier than thought” (from the 15th):

The carcass of a frozen mammoth with signs of weapon-inflicted injuries suggests humans were present in the Eurasian Arctic ten millennia earlier than previously thought. These results, which provide perhaps the oldest known story of human survival in the Arctic region, date human presence there to roughly 45,000 years ago, instead of 35,000 years ago, as previously thought.

Sergey Gorbunov excavating the mammoth carcass. Pitulko et al., Science (2016)

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Posted in History, Mammoths, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Lyrical flight of fancy

January 17, 2016

Ruthie in One Big Happy is really good at getting the general shape of lyrics to songs, through a bunch of verses, but she falls down on most of the details. Today’s strip:

If this had come from Walt (“Deck the halls with Boston Charlie”) Kelly or Bill (“My funny serpentine”) Griffith, we would think of it as inspired nonsense, a wonderful burlesque, but when it comes from a kid, we see it as goofy ineptitude. Ok, ok, a child in a comic strip, not a real child.

Wicker Wonderland,
Where the tree toads kissed him,
To eat meatballs in the snow…

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Parody | Leave a Comment »

Oh, the *Heimlich* maneuver!

January 17, 2016

A Bloom County cartoon from 6/25/06, with a malapropistic Opus:

Hind-lick maneuver as an error for Heimlich maneuver has made the net rounds as a joke about two hillbillies. I prefer Breathed’s confused-penguin version.

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Malapropisms | 1 Comment »

Snowclone to the rescue

January 17, 2016

Yesterday’s Mother Goose and Grimm, in which Mother Goose deploys a snowclone strategically and Grimm gives her a SNAP for her performance:

One of the great (and most frequent) snowclones of all time, The New Y (in full: X Is The New Y).

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Snowclones | Leave a Comment »

The family that fund-raises together

January 17, 2016

From a Gail Collins column “Everything’s Relative” in the NYT on the 14th, about political candidates engaging their families in their campaigns:

Remember Jeb? He was going to run as his own man, but people on the campaign mailing list are getting requests for donations from George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Barbara Bush, George P. Bush and Columba Bush [Jeb’s father, brother, mother, son, and wife, respectively]. The family that fund-raises together stays together.

Collins chose to use the 2-part back-formed V (2pbfV) fund-raises rather than the phrase raises funds, and (though a fair number of people, including some language critics, are deeply hostile to 2pbfVs, as unnecessary innovations) in my opinion that was an excellent choice: fund-raises describes an activity that is more unitary, and more specific, than raises funds. There’s a distinction here that’s come up on this blog several times, and there’s also a general principle at work, a principle I’ll call Structural Tightness.

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Posted in Back formation, Compounds, Semantics, Synthetic compounds | Leave a Comment »

Penis size in the steam room

January 16, 2016

Today’s Steam Room Stories (which you can view here) circled around once again to a topic always of fascination to the young men in the steamroom: penis size. One guy confessed that he was down because his girlfriend freaked out as they were getting into serious love-making. He’d warned her that he had an infant-size penis, and she was cool with that, but then when it came time for his pants to come off, she freaked. Oh, his steamroom buddy says, that’s totally insulting, to reject a guy because he has a little penis. No, no, the first guy said, I didn’t warn her that I have a penis the size of an infant’s, but that I have a penis the size of an infant: 6 lbs. 7 oz. and 18 inches long. His buddy asks to see, and is then suitably astounded. The big reveal:

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Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, Language and the body, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

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