A One Big Happy from yesterday (May 25), on conversational organization; and then three from this morning’s (June 1st) crop: a Bizarro with an ambiguity introduced by truncation; yet another meta-Zippy, this time on reports of Zippy’s death; and a Rhymes With Orange with a pun from the Black Lagoon.
Archive for the ‘Ambiguity’ Category
May-June turnover
June 1, 2014Three for Memorial Day
May 26, 2014For (U.S.) Memorial Day — today — three diverse cartoons, none of them about war or memorializing troops: A PHD Comics on ambiguity; a Doonesbury on vegetable (parallel to animal) language; and a Mother Goose and Grimm uniting two Shermans (so there’s a bit about war in there — the (U.S.) Civil War).
Three more diverse
May 24, 2014Three recent cartoons on divergent subjects: a Bizarro with language play turning on ambiguity; a Scenes From a Multiverse with metacommentary by the characters; and another classic Watergate Doonesbury, from 1974, with the denominal verb to stonewall.
On the verge of a collective
May 12, 2014The cartoon below came to me from several sources on the net (I don’t know its ultimate source):
Crucial background: murder is a “term of venery”, a collective noun used with very specific referents, in this case crows. (Ordinary collectives, like group, crowd, and in fact collection, can refer to referents of many different kinds.)
A murder of crows has come up in passing several times, as a memorable example of a term of venery; there is a more extensive discussion of the expression in this posting, on a Pearls Before Swine cartoon that turns on the ambiguity of the expression.
The cartoon above turns on a different question: how many crows does it take to make a murder of them?
Three more for Friday
May 2, 2014Three cartoons today, on diverse topics: Calvin and Hobbes on explanations, Zits on means of communication (again), Bizarro on word play turning on ambiguity.
Background knowledge
April 27, 2014On April 25th, on ADS-L, from Pat O’Conner (of Grammarphobia.com), under the heading “A crash blossom for the ages”:
Dare you to decipher this one, from Reuters (London) on April 16th:
“Stuttering Man City Held by Bottom Side Sunderland”
Pat translates:
“Man City” is Manchester City, a football (soccer) team (or “side”). Sunderland is another; it plays in the lowest league (“bottom”).
Speech act ambiguity
April 20, 2014From an esurance commercial on tv, entitled “Hank” (the key bit is boldfaced):
Hank: My daughter thinks I’m out of touch. So I asked her how I saved 15 percent on car insurance in just 15 minutes.
Neighbor: Huh. (shakes head)
Hank: (looks at phone) “IDK?” What does that mean?
Neighbor: “I don’t know.”
Hank: And I’m the one who’s out of touch. LOL.
The neighbor is answering Hank’s question, a request for information, asking about what “IDK” means. Hank understands this instead as an assertion, by the neighbor, that he doesn’t know what “IDK” means. (Hank then thinks the neighbor is out of touch.) Both understandings involve assertions, but about different aspects of the conversational exchange.
Ambiguity for leeches
April 15, 2014Posted by Neil Copeland on Facebook and passed on by Mar Rojo, this article from the New Zealand Press, by Rachel Young, with the headline:
Is this NZ’s creepiest crawly?
and the subhead:
Rare land leeches have been found on several offshore islands, one of which is now headed to Te Papa [the museum in Wellington]
The ambiguity of the subhead elicited some discussion: is it a land leech or an offshore island that’s headed to Te Papa? (Details below.)
Pesky capitalization
April 12, 2014From Chris Waigl on Facebook, this image of a headline.
Among the most common functions of initial caps are marking the first word of a sentence and marking proper names. Both are, at least at first, here. But the ‘annoying memorabilia’ interpretation is very unlikely. Then you need to know that Johnny Pesky was a baseball player — a fact immediately made clear in the body of the story,