Playing with ambiguity:
— a One Big Happy cartoon with: I feel like a tuna fish sandwich
— a domestic exchange about: I will make a dessert of my youth
— a Pearls Before Swine cartoon with: Tell me roughly
— a photograph, labeled Schrödinger’s Dumpster, of a dumpster with the signage: EMPTY WHEN FULL
Posted in Abbreviation, Adverbs, Allusion, Ambiguity, Argument structure, Comic conventions, Conlangs, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Signage | 4 Comments »
(OPAs, for short.) The contrast is to inconspicuously playful allusions, what I’ve called Easter egg quotations on this blog. With three OPAs from the 4/20/19 Economist, illustrating three levels of closeness between the content of the OPA and the topic of the article: no substantive relationship between the two (the Nock, Nock case), tangential relationship (the Sunset brouhaha case), and tight relationship (the defecate in the woods case).
The three cases also illustrate three degrees of paronomasia: the Nock, Nock case involves a (phonologically) perfect pun; the Sunset brouhaha case an imperfect pun; and the defecate in the woods case no pun at all, but whole-word substitutions.
I’ll start in the middle, with Sunset brouhaha. But first, some background. Which will incorporate flaming saganaki; be prepared.
Posted in Acronyms, Allusion, Ambiguity, Idioms, Implicature, Jokes, Language and animals, Language and food, Language play, Metaphor, Metonymy, Movies and tv, Names, Pragmatics, Puns, Quotation, Sarcasm and irony, Semantics, Speech acts | 3 Comments »
Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm does a crossover with Peanuts:
(#1)
That’s Snoopy, who imagines himself as a World War I flying ace, while imagining his doghouse as a Sopwith Camel.
(#2)
Posted in Allusion, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »
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