Four cartoons today: a Dilbert, a Bizarro, a Mother Goose and Grimm, and a Scenes from the Multiverse:
Archive for the ‘Ambiguity’ Category
Monday quartet
March 31, 2014The anaphor joke
March 20, 2014From a site with “20 Jokes That Only Intellectuals Will Understand”, one that I had not heard before, appealing to both linguists and programmers.
The set-up:
19. The programmer’s wife tells him: “Run to the store and pick up a loaf of bread.. If they have eggs, get a dozen.”
Ok, there’s an ellipsis, of an indefinite: a dozen of something. But what? There are two candidates in the context: the close eggs, and the discourse-topical loaf of bread. In the joke, the programmer’s wife intends the first, but the programmer supplies the second, as the punch line indicates:
The programmer comes home with 12 loaves of bread.
funny
March 11, 2014Today’s Bizarro:
The two relevant senses, from NOAD2:
1 causing laughter or amusement; humorous: a funny story | the play is hilariously funny.
2 difficult to explain or understand; strange: I had a funny feeling you’d be around | a funny thing, democracy.
The patient in the cartoon above believes that funny applies in both senses to New Yorker cartoons. And so it sometimes does.
Three cartoons for Saturday
March 8, 2014Maybe I’m just easily amused today, but three cartoons caught my eye: a Zippy, a Rhymes With Orange, and a Pearls Before Swine:
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Odds and ends 2/13/14
February 13, 2014Two (unrelated) items in my queue, on familiar topics: ambiguity and government by the nearest.
Pig fails again
February 12, 2014Today’s Pearls Before Swine:
Once agan, Pig falls foul of the Comic Book Censor. This time, it’s over the expression flip s.o. the bird, understood literally (as Pig intends) or as a reference to a rude gesture, giving someone the finger (which comes up here every so often).
Average
January 28, 2014Yesterday’s Dilbert, on average:
The cartoon uses average as a technical term — mean or median — and also as an ordinary language term, meaning ‘mediocre’, invidiously.
Homophonophobia
January 27, 2014This lovely coinage appeared recently on the Magic Coffee Hair site, in this cartoon:
A play on homophobic, of course.
Meanwhile, homophones are everywhere.
(The artist identifies himself merely as Jim. Webcartoonists are sometimes reclusive.)
last/past
December 31, 2013On the Baltimore Sun blog on the 4th, a piece by John McIntyre on last and past, “Not, unfortunately, the last word”, beginning:
No sooner do I put up a post about copy editors’ preoccupation with dog-whistle distinctions than someone turns up commenting on a post from 2011 on the newspaper last/past crotchet
What’s at issue is the ambiguity of last.
Headline news
December 28, 2013Two headline items, one definitely linguistic, the other entertaining mostly because of the content.