Today’s Bizarro, with a play on two senses of complimentary:
The short version of the story, on the adjective complimentary in NOAD2:
1 expressing a compliment; praising or approving: Jennie was very complimentary about Kathy’s riding | complimentary remarks.
2 given or supplied free of charge: a complimentary bottle of wine.
But there’s a considerably longer story, starting with the question of how these two senses are related.
Passed along by Mike Pope, this supremely annoying video clip in which a man poses what sounds like a question riddle to a woman, who can’t interpret the question, and the man, chuckling offensively, just goes on repeating the question. But if she didn’t get the trick early on, she’ll be stuck indefinitely in her incomprehension — and by the time her tormentor finally provides hints that might let her see the trick, there’s no hope she’ll get out of the processing hole she’s in.
I would label the man as an asshole or a total dick, but since the speakers are British, I prefer to call him a first-class twat.
But check it out for yourself:
An image posted by actor/director Chris Pratt on his Facebook page:
(#1)
The initialistic abbreviation BJ stands for Beijing here, but of course blowjob will come first to many people’s minds — even though then the t-shirt should go
I ♥︎
BJs
And there are more possibilities; it’s in the nature of abbreviations to be multiply ambiguoua.
Passed on by Chris Hansen on Facebook, this story of 6/23 from thelocal.no (“Norway’s news in English”), “Is this the worst summer job ever?”:
A nineteen-year-old in Norway has been hired by a sexual health charity to play a giant penis who surprises passers-by by spraying them with golden confetti.
“I thought it was hilarious. If I can do a good thing for others, just by being a dick, there is nothing better,” Philip van Eck, the man inside the penis costume, told Norway’s Tønsberg Blad newspaper.
It’s all about STDs.
From the Daily Jocks people, announcing a sale (the savings just got bigger) and also toying with the idea of penis enlargement. And then there’s a point about the semantics / pragmatics of just, which I’ll get at by adding three captions to this photo:
In my e-mail this morning, two linguistic comics: a One Big Happy and a Mother Goose and Grimm:
(#1)
(#2)
Michael Maslin in the latest (May 25th) New Yorker:
(#1)
(You need to recognize from the setting that the creature the cowboy is faced with is a so-called prairie dog — not any kind of dog, but instead a kind of ground squirrel.)
The echo of “I’m not that kind of girl” adds to the humor.
A Meg Biddle cartoon in the June 2015 Funny Times:
(#1)
Yes-no questions with the tag or what? are regularly used to emphatically assert the truth of the questioned proposition. So
Is this a great country, or what?
has the effect of proclaiming that this is indeed a great country. But the question has at least one other reading, merely asking for an alternative answer to Is this a great country?, and that’s the reading Biddle is playing with in the cartoon.
Today’s Zippy dwells on a parsing ambiguity:
Two parsings for the Adj + N + N permanent laundry markers:
(1) Adj + [ N + N ] ‘laundry markers that are permanent’ (Griffy’s intent)
(2) [ Adj + N ] + N ‘markers for permanent laundry’ (Zippy’s understanding)
From Benita Bendon Campbell, a riddle and its answer:
I wondered about the source of the image and of the riddle. (Bonnie found this version on the Writer’s Circle Facebook group, with no indication of its earlier history.) The riddle has appeared with quite a collection of artwork (on ecards, in particular), none of it attributed, and some posters characterize it as “an old riddle”, but that just might mean that they recall it from when they were younger; we could be looking at the Antiquity Illusion here.