Author Archive
August 4, 2019
From The Economist of July 27th. Yes, it’s grammatical, but it’s fiercely hard to parse — you might feel the need to get out pencil and paper to graph the thing — and it’s also a big show-stopper flourish: stop reading the news to admire how clever we are!
In this case, the magazine has committed a nested clausal comparative (NCC), somewhat reminiscent of nested relative clauses (also known in the syntactic literature as self-embedded relative clauses) like those in the NP with head the rat modified by the relative clause that the cat that the dog worried ate:
[ the rat ]-i
… [ that [ the cat ]-j [ that [ the dog ] worried ___-j ] ate ___-i ]
(where an underline indicates a missing (“extracted”) constituent, and the indices mark coreferential constituents). Both nested relatives and NCCs require the hearer to interrupt the processing of one clause to process another clause of similar form.
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Posted in Comparison, Formulaic language, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Processing, Semantics, Syntax | 4 Comments »
August 4, 2019
In today’s NYT Magazine (in print), a Jason Parham comment “This is not a drill”, on a 7/21 (in print) piece by Claudia Rankine, the comment turned into a thumbnail illustration by Giacomo Gambineri:
The Magrittean disavowal Ceci n’est pas une perceuse ‘This is not a drill’ (referring to une perceuse, a device for making — piercing — holes in things), but playing on the English catchphrase This is not a drill, conveying ‘This is the real thing, this is serious’.
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Posted in Art, Catchphrases, Gender and sexuality, Language play, Race and ethnicity, Writers | Leave a Comment »
August 4, 2019
… provided by friends in a time of unspeakable violence, though neither is a totally unmixed pleasure: from Mike McKinley, the 1962 boys’ space adventure yarn Lost City of Uranus, just for the cheap but evergreen double entendre in its title; from Betsy Herrington, a link to the rainbow dreadhead stone lions of Monza, Italy, an admirable exercise in yarn bombing.
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Posted in Art, Books, Double entendres, Gender and sexuality, Narrative | 3 Comments »
August 2, 2019
That’s today’s advice from Zippy:
(#1)
Zippy is a long-time fan of speech balloons, their history, their uses, their attractions. In fact, speech balloons are a fairly frequent explicit theme in cartoons — cartoons about cartooning.
And then there’s the theme of things you shouldn’t go out without — from a certain amount of cash or your identity papers, to makeup or condoms, to American Express products or (if you’re hitchhiking in space) a towel.
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Posted in Comic conventions, Gender and sexuality, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv | 1 Comment »
August 1, 2019
In the August 5th & 12th New Yorker, this droll cartoon by John McNamee:
(#1)
To understand the cartoon, you must, first of all, recognize the figures of a bull and a bullfighter. Crucial cultural knowledge, but not (I think) especially challenging. Then there are the other details — the two of them are seated in a livingroom, the bull is having a dainty cup of tea, the bullfighter is showing the bull patches of the color red. And then there’s the caption: how does it knit some or all of these things into a joke?
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Posted in Art, Folk beliefs, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Understanding comics | 8 Comments »
July 30, 2019
(I posted a version of this under the heading “The opossum” on July 30th, but by a WordPress glitch the link to that posting was later re-directed to the next posting in line, “Ralph at the Port Authority” (here), so that my earlier posting disappeared completely. I lamented this loss on Facebook, and eventually archivist and quote investigator Garson O’Toole magicked up a Google Cache version of the text for me. Thanks to Garson, here’s a reconstituted version.)
(Totally baffled addendum. WordPress has published this revised posting with the date 7/30, though it was actually posted on 8/1.)
A very sweet One Big Happy from 6/30: Ruthie and her grandfather:
(#1)
A granddad joke — well, actually, two of them in sequence, the first sledgehammer simple (a classic dad joke), the second delightfully subtle (a meta-joke in which the audience response becomes a crucial part of the joke).
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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Humor, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Puns, Routines and rituals, Words and things | Leave a Comment »
July 27, 2019
(Underwear boys, so not to everyone’s tastes. But not especially raunchy.)
Young men in the, if you know what I mean, pink of life, advertising a Lucas Studios porn sale, with my caption:
Mindful of the
Neighborhood rash of
Bikini brief thefts,
Pongo was fearfully
Protective of
Bongo’s beloved
Magenta Silks
For a change, this is not about men’s bodies, pleasing though these are; nor about pink/purple men’s bikini briefs, though there’s a fabulous array of them on display on the net; but about facial expressions.
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Posted in Captions, Facial expressions, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Underwear | 1 Comment »
July 27, 2019
A brief note about guacamole and its referent, thanks to this ADS-L posting on 7/26 by Bill Mullins:
OED has 1920 for guacamole. Barry Popik has 1894. [see below]
Bill takes this back a few years:
Springfield [VT] Reporter 25 Sep 1891 p 2 col 3.
“The famous aguacate, known here as the alligator pear, is really no fruit, but a vegetable, eatable only as a salad “guacamole,” and of the daintiest. . . New Orleans Picayune”
My interest here is not in the antedating, but in the characterization that the avocado is “eatable only as a salad”, guacamole.
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Posted in Names | Leave a Comment »
July 26, 2019
In the July 29th New Yorker, two cartoons about things for American lawns, each requiring one key piece of knowledge for understanding: Bob Eckstein showing a moment of silence; Farley Katz featuring a distressed bird.
(#1)
(#2)
Both cartoons are complex — several things are going on at once, including allusions to American political life — but you can’t get anywhere with them unless you recognize the repeated images in them: the shuttlecocks of the game badminton in the Epstein, the plastic lawn flamingos in the Katz.
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Posted in Language and animals, Language and sports, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Phallicity, Social life, Understanding comics | 3 Comments »
