Arnold Zwicky's Blog

In the 9/21 issue of the New Yorker, this Lila Ash cartoon “Evolution of Man”:

(#1) New Yorker description of the cartoon: The evolution of man from a fish to a human throwing their phone in the water, and swimming in to retrieve it.

Yet another variation on the Ascent of Man theme; there have been so many of these on this blog that there’s a Page cataloguing them, here.

Lila Ash is new to this blog. Young — her BFA is from 2011 (Rhode Island School of Design) — feminist, and bicoastal, she’s been offering cartoons regularly to the New Yorker, and has had some hits. Here are two other cartoons of hers, in very contemporary settings, touching on other themes in this blog:

(#2) On facial expressions

(#3) A lovely intrusion of life on the net into the real life, of one world into another

Resting bitch face. From Wikipedia:

Resting bitch face … , or bitchy resting face … , is a facial expression that unintentionally appears as if a person is angry, annoyed, irritated, or contemptuous, particularly when the individual is relaxed, resting or not expressing any particular emotion.

… In a 2013 year-end round-up of newly popular words and phrases [in the New York Times, lexicographer] Grant Barrett asserted that the phrase dates back “at least ten years”

Cookies of the internet (not culinary) sort. From Wikipedia:

An HTTP cookie (also called web cookie, Internet cookie, browser cookie, or simply cookie) is a small piece of data stored on the user’s computer by the web browser while browsing a website. Cookies were designed to be a reliable mechanism for websites to remember stateful information (such as items added in the shopping cart in an online store) or to record the user’s browsing activity (including clicking particular buttons, logging in, or recording which pages were visited in the past). They can also be used to remember pieces of information that the user previously entered into form fields, such as names, addresses, passwords, and payment card numbers.

… The term “cookie” was coined by web-browser programmer Lou Montulli [in 1994]. It was derived from the term “magic cookie”, which is a packet of data a program receives and sends back unchanged, used by Unix programmers.

This entry was posted on September 19, 2020 at 10:55 am and is filed under Cartoon conventions, Evolution, Facial expression, Linguistics in the comics, Technology, These modern times. 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.