Arnold Zwicky's Blog

On the occasion of my posting a Bob Eckstein (“bob”) cartoon (#1 in 6/22/16, “Two tests in cartoon understanding”), the cartoonist has friended me on Facebook (earlier Eckstein from 5/30/15, “Earworms, snowmen, and parodies”). So now a few more of his cartoons, of several different types.

First: bob is fond of POPs (phrasal overlap portmanteaus). One that tickles me:

(#1)

To understand this, you need to know the component expressions — free-range beef and Beefeater — and their referents, and so to recognize that the cartoon shows Beefeaters foraging freely on a farm, a wonderfully absurd idea.

Two, a wordless cartoon that requires you to recognize two things: the Rubik’s Cube (and how you deal with it) and the cartoon meme of the seeker after the knowledge of a seer — scaling a mountainside to seek englightenment (and perfection) from the master:

(#2)

The seeker is a Rubik’s Cube in its jumbled state, as you would get it in a store. But the master (sitting in the lotus position) is a perfect, solved cube.

Third and last, another cartoon that requires two recognitions: that the characters in it are space aliens, as conventionally represented:

(#3)

and that they are engaged in that odd American custom, the spelling bee (a contest whose existence depends on the many eccentricities of English spelling):

(#4)

This entry was posted on June 24, 2016 at 6:24 pm and is filed under Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Phrasal overlap 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.