Today’s One Big Happy:
If you don’t know the snowclonelet template X mix for dog hybrids (poodle mix, shepherd mix, etc.) and don’t know that Lab can be a clipping of Labrador Retriever, then you’re thrown back on things you do know and have to treat lab mix as a compound meaning something like ‘something mixed up, created, in a lab’. Cue Frankenstein.
In response to my Zippy posting earlier today in which I looked for the source of the strip’s title, “Peachy Keen”, Drew Smith suggested that the peach part came from the strip Miss Peach rather than (my suggestion) the game character Princess Peach. At issue was the model or models for a grotesquely big-headed character in the Zippy. I wasn’t entirely convinced, but now I see that Miss Peach seems not to have come up on this blog, so it would be worth discussing.
Following up on my posting yesterday of a Dilbert strip that ended with Alice apparently bent on castration, David Preston resurrected a droll Dilbert of 11/9/93:
UNIX, eunuchs, what’s the dif?
Two cartoons today turning on ambiguities: a One Big Happy in which Ruthie confronts two ways in which someone can be said to keep books; and a Calvin and Hobbes in which Calvin does something similar with ways in which a writer can have a block:
(#1)
(#2)
Yesterday’s One Big Happy, in which Ruthie works at telling jokes:
Part of acquiring a language is acquiring a large assortment of social routines using that language — including joke patterns. Linguists studying conversation have looked at the acquisition of a number of different joke types, for example knock-knock jokes, where they see the gradual unfolding of the abilities involved in producing and appreciating jokes. For instance, many jokes turn on puns, so that a child has to learn that exact wording can be crucial to the joke; paraphrase won’t do. But children often fail to appreciate that, while still understanding that laughter is called for at a certain point in the joke.
Today’s Bizarro, with a play on abduction:
So: abduction by aliens (‘extraterrestial beings’) — but for what purpose? In a significantly conventionalized use of alien abduction, the purpose is probing human beings, but here the purpose of the abduction is a more common one: kidnapping for ransom (where it happens that the kidnappers are alien creatures). There are other possibilities.
Today’s Zippy, with a candy-bar parody of Schiller’s Ode to Joy (An der Freude), used by Beethoven in the last movement of his Ninth Symphony:
(#1)
Almond Joy, Mounds, Mars bars! Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t.
Today’s Bizarro, continuing Piraro’s ambiguity theme:
PST lost of the transitive verb lose, used here in a specialized subsense of a ‘be deprived of’ sense. From NOAD2:
be deprived of (a close relative or friend) through their death or as a result of the breaking off of a relationship: she lost her husband in the fire.
This in contrast to an ‘unable to find’ sense:
become unable to find (something or someone): I’ve lost the car keys.
How do we work out that these two senses intersect in the cartoon?
Yesterday, a Bizarro with an ambiguity in auto parts. Today, another ambiguity, somewhat simpler than that one:
Two interpretations for the N + N compound bird seed, differing in the semantic relationship between the head N seed and the accompanying N bird — one like parrot seed ‘seed to give parrots, to feed parrots’, one like grass seed ‘seed of grass, i.e., of the grass plant; seed to grow grass from’.
Today’s Bizarro, exploiting an unexpected ambiguity:
It’s all in the parts. Components (of an automobile) or a role in a dramatic work (which, in this case, is to be taken by — surprise! — an automobile).