Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Somewhat out-of-kilter word play: the purely orthographic pun. On this blog on 1/27/14, a Bizarro with King George IV and playing on IV ‘the 4th’ vs. IV ‘intravenous’. And on 7/26/15, a Dave Blazek cartoon turning on the ambiguity of the orthographic noun mobile:  mobile ‘mobile phone’ vs. mobile ‘scupture that is suspended so as to turn freely in the air’. Cartoon in #2 there, an image of a mobile phone in #3, and an Alexander Calder mobile in #4. From that posting:

These two nouns are identical in spelling, but not pronunciation: the phone is a /móbǝl/ or /móbàjl/, the sculpture is a /móbìl/ (and Mobile AL is /mòbíl/).

Somewhat strained, but here it is again in yesterday’s Pearls Before Swine:

Well, it works on the page.

(Oh yes, Italian mobile ‘changeable, fickle’ is trisyllabic.)

(Hat tip to Andy Sleeper.)

This entry was posted on November 19, 2016 at 5:05 pm and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Spelling. 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.