To begin the new week, a bilingual rock-music groaner in today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro:
To understand this cartoon, you have to know the Spanish gratitude formula muchas gracias ‘many thanks’, and you have to know that Jerry Garcia was the lead guitarist of the rock group The Grateful Dead; otherwise, the cartoon is just baffling (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
Garcias (the plural of the name Garcia) is a pun on gracias ‘thanks’ in muchas gracias — but it works better as orthographic play (just AR for RA, a reversal) than as phonological play, since Garcias and gracias are strikingly different in their prosody (second-syllable accent in Garcias, first-syllable accent in gracias); and if Garcias is pronounced in English and gracias in Spanish, they’re also segmentally distinct, notably in the final syllable, [ǝz] in English, [as] in Spanish, and in the phonetics of the r.
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