Arnold Zwicky's Blog

The Wayno Bizarro for today, 11/28, is an exercise in cartoon understanding:

(#1) Wayno’s title: “Horrifyingly Tasty”; I would have suggested the more bloodthirsty “Eat Your Gods” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

But it’s all totally baffling unless you recognize the references to Charles Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts; you really have to know about Linus and the Great Pumpkin. (Meanwhile, your appreciation of the strip will be enriched if you know that today is US Thanksgiving, a harvest festival for which the traditional foods include pumpkin pie for dessert.)

And while we’re talking festivals, the cartoon is a festival of ambiguities in English, structural and lexical.

But first, two little digressions.

— digression 1: the harvest festival of Thanksgiving is celebrated in Canada on the second Monday in October (US Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday in November)

— digression 2: we’ve just had, two days ago, Schulz’s birthday; he was born on 11/26/1922 — so the cartoon honors Sparky Schulz as well as marking my country’s harvest festival

The Great Pumpkin. The appalled / disgusted character on the right in #1 is Wayno’s version of Linus from Peanuts. From Wikipedia:

(#2) Linus awaits the Great Pumpkin

The Great Pumpkin is an unseen character in the comic strip Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz. According to Linus van Pelt, the Great Pumpkin is a legendary personality who rises from the pumpkin patch on Halloween carrying a large bag of toys to deliver to believing children. Linus continues to maintain faith in the Great Pumpkin, despite his friends’ mockery and disbelief.

… The Great Pumpkin was first introduced in the strip dated October 26, 1959, and Schulz subsequently reworked the premise many times throughout the run of Peanuts, notably inspiring the 1966 animated television special It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

A triumph of hope, and dogged belief in great goodness (that is: solid Schulz).

The carnival of ambiguity. Out of the many meanings of the English adjective great, just two that  figure in #1:

great ‘very large and imposing’ vs. great ‘of very high quality; very good’

And then there’s a structural ambiguity, involving two different parsings of great pumpkin pie:

[great pumpkin] + [pie] ‘pie made from a great pumpkin or pumpkins’

vs. [great] + [pumpkin pie] ‘pumpkin pie that is great’

Put them together and the expression is 4-ways ambiguous:

[great pumpkin] [pie] ‘pie made from a great (very large vs. very good) pumpkin or pumpkins’

vs. [great] [pumpkin pie] ‘pumpkin pie that is great (very large vs. very good)’

But we aren’t home yet. The girl in #1 says her mom is famous for making “great pumpkin pie”; that is, she produces a version of

/gret pʌmkɪn paj/, spelled: great pumpkin pie (with four readings as above, of which the girl intends ‘pumpkin pie that is very good’)

But Linus understands her to have produced a version of

/gret pʌmkɪn paj/, spelled: Great Pumpkin pie ‘pie made from the Great Pumpkin’ (ick)

This is the crucial ambiguity, the one on which the humor of #1 turns: between /gret pʌmkɪn/ the proper name Great Pumpkin and /gret pʌmkɪn/ the common nominal great pumpkin. And that only works if you know about the Great Pumpkin (who is great in the sense ‘very large and imposing’).

And now I observe, annoyingly, that there are quite a few other Great Pumpkins — among them, a number of beers, including an ale and a golden stout; an organization encouraging the growing of giant fruits and vegetables; a foot race; and a regatta. Most of them probably named after Schulz’s Great Pumpkin, but none of them a legendary personality that Linus van Pelt believes rises from the pumpkin patch on Halloween. So in principle it would be possible for you to know about one of these Great Pumpkins, say the golden stout, and still fail totally fail to appreciate #1.

 

This entry was posted on November 28, 2024 at 9:49 am and is filed under Ambiguity, Common & proper, Grammatical categories, Holidays, Language and food, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Parsing, Understanding 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.