Arnold Zwicky's Blog

In a private corner of Facebook today, this family exchange:

Child A was very busy.
Parent about A: He has an agenda
Child A: I’m not a gender
Parent: An agenda is when you have something you want to do
Child B: A gender is someone who serves food at baseball games
Parent: That’s a vendor
Child C *dies laughing*

And then from another parent:

My kid was so proud she tried cantaloupe at school. “The fruit, not the animal”

Ruthie in the comic strip One Big Happy (Page inventorying the strip on this blog here) is a constantly entertaining source of efforts to cope with unfamiliar words and larger expressions, via snowclonish reanalyses, word confusions, and just plain mishearings. Above we see Ruthian coping by kids in real life: agenda / a gender, gender / vendor, cantaloupe / antelope.

The last of these has been a rich source of comic art and illustration. Three items from this trove.

A 1951  Ethyl gasoline ad:

(#1)

Canteloupe 1, mostly antelope (in a RedBubble poster):

(#2)

Canteloupe 2, mostly cantaloupe (a piece of DeviantArt by shot-in-the-dark):

(#3)

 

This entry was posted on February 3, 2019 at 7:08 pm and is filed under Errors, Linguistics in the comics, Snowclones, Word confusions. 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.