Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s One Big Happy:

(#1)

Ah, a potential orthographic ambiguity, turning on word division: MENSWEAR as MENS WEAR ‘men’s clothing’ (what the store intends) or MEN SWEAR ‘men curse’ (what Ruthie reads).

As is often the case, when there’s an ambiguity, somebody is going to play on both meanings at once. In this case, men swearing about men’s wear / menswear. There’s at least one website devoted to it, in fact:

Real Men Swear: Another Fucking Menswear Blog

in which men’s fashion shots are profanely captioned. Two examples:

(#2)

(#3)

This entry was posted on March 31, 2017 at 4:48 am and is filed under Ambiguity, Clothing, Fashion, 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.