From Horton Copperpot this morning, a Scott Hilburn cartoon in which carbon dating (estimating the age of organic material via rates of radioactive decay) is crossed with online dating (finding romantic or sexual partners via internet services):
(This appears to be a Tyrannosaurs rex, which flourished in the Cretaceous, not the Triassic. [Thanks to John Baker and Robert Coren for catching errors in an earlier version of this posting.])
In any case, two earlier cartoons on this blog with plays on carbon dating and/or the two-part back-formed verb (2pbfV) to carbon-date, in combination with another sense of the verb date: ‘go out with (someone in whom one is romantically or sexually interested)’ and then ‘indicate or expose as being old-fashioned’ (definitions from NOAD2) — the second in examples like “That really dates me”:
a Multiverse strip (posted on 1/20/12) in which one character says “We’ve carbon-dated these fossils” (using the 2pbfV) and a second character says “I don’t believe in carbon dating” (instead, only carbon marriage is acceptable)
a Dilbert strip (posted on 12/5/14) with a dinosaur boasting to Dilbert about how cool he is because he has a SmartWatch , which he then asks what time it is, and the watch replies that this is the Anthropocene Epoch. “Wow”, says the dinosaur, “that really carbon dates me”, folding the ‘expose as old-fashioned’ sense into the 2pbfV
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