Arnold Zwicky's Blog

👨‍🏭 👨‍🏭 penultimate April: in only two days, a gaggle of rabbits, strewing lilies of the valley promiscuously, will dance around an International Workers pole; be prepared

Meanwhile, Masayoshi Yamada, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics in Shimane University, in western Honshu (author of, inter alia: A Dictionary of Trade Names and A Dictionary of English Taboo and Euphemism), has appealed to me by e-mail on 4/24 with another puzzle from cartoons in English (his last query, reported on in my 9/25/24 posting “This idiom has had the radish”, had to do with the idiom have the radish in a Zits strip). This time it’s about one of Lynn Johnston’s For Better or For Worse strips, (re)published on 6/19/24:

There are three linguistic things going on in this cartoon: the ambiguity of the verb count; the invented -illions words; and the thing MY was puzzled by, the gigantic “nonsense nonce coinage” (as he put it) hoozamaflazamadoozama modifying jillions

After some background words about the strip, I’ll take up these three things one by one, expanding on things I wrote to MY.

For Better or For Worse. From Wikipedia:

For Better or For Worse is a Canadian comic strip by Lynn Johnston that ran originally from 1979 to 2008 chronicling the lives of the Patterson family and their friends, in the town of Milborough, a fictional suburb of Toronto, Ontario. Now running as reruns, For Better or For Worse is still seen in over 2,000 newspapers throughout Canada, the U.S., Mexico and around twenty other countries.

The strip is noted for its humanity and good humor; for having its characters age and change over time; and for its realistic (rather than escapist — idealized or fantasized) plotlines: the beloved family dog dies at one point, one of the children comes out as gay, and so on.

Thing 1: the verb count. And its ambiguity in the cartoon between ‘enumerate’ and ‘matter’. The daughter asks the mother Can anyone count that much? — enumerate something that’s into the hoozamaflazamadoozamajillions, as a measure of how much her mother loves her. Her mother replies You do [count that much], meaning ‘you matter that much to me’.

On the two senses, from NOAD:

verb count: 1 [a] [with object] determine the total number of (a collection of items): I started to count the stars I could see | they counted up their change … 3 [a] [no object] be significant: it did not matter what the audience thought — it was the critics that counted

Thing 2: –illions beyond imagination. For collections so large they surpass millions, billions, trillions, and all the rest, we get invented –illion words

dillions, jillions, zillions, kafillions

Outside this strip, the playful invention gazillions is often used to convey an unimaginably enormous number — presumably, an uncountable infinity, one that no one can count, even if they have forever (forgive me, I used to be a mathematician).

Thing 3 is the playful invention hoozamaflazamadoozama modifying jillions. But I’m going to have to put this main section off until tomorrow. Partly because of time lost to extended hassles over my GoComics subscription. But mostly because it was a transcendently beautiful day — finally — so my caregiver J took me to the Gamble Garden in Palo Alto, where we could revel in a sea of flowers and intriguing shrubs and trees. It was wonderful.

Sweetly, it started with a blooming tree — a California buckeye (Aesculus californica) — right in front of his parked car and ended with a tall (like 4 ft.) flower, just to the left of the car — a plant with enormous white flowers like nothing J had ever seen, growing in a drift of California poppies  (Eschscholzia californica), which sprout everywhere that isn’t paved and which J can now reliably identify. I was able to tell J that this was in fact another poppy: a Matilija poppy (genus Romneya).

In between, wonderful stuff that made both of us happy. But all this made him run late on his housework and me late in getting to this posting. I guess we were playing hooky.

But now my day is coming to an end.  See you tomorrow.

This entry was posted on April 29, 2025 at 5:31 pm and is filed under Ambiguity, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Mathematics, Onomatopoeia, Sound symbolism. 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.