Archive for the ‘Ambiguity’ Category
July 18, 2024
Zippy is known for his enthusiasm for specific words, is given to playing with them in public. Today’s Zippy strip shows our Pinhead drifting happily through six encounters with ball, in the title (In the ballpark) and five times in the text:
(#1) In four idiomatic expressions and then, in panel 3, when we’re set up to expect idiomatic drop the ball ‘make a mistake’, Zippy goes all literal on us by, just, dropping the ball
The four idioms: have a ball, keep one’s eye on the ball, the ball is in someone’s court, take one’s ball and go home. One use of ball ‘formal social gathering for dancing’, followed by three uses of ball ‘spherical object’ in the context of playing games or sports. The effect in the text is to switch from one way of thinking to another: the social gathering image gives way immediately to three game-playing images, and then Zippy gets literal.
Now to look at the lexical resources Bill Griffith is tapping in this strip. But first, a diversion to six actual (game-playing) balls.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Formulaic language, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Toys and games | Leave a Comment »
June 27, 2024
A follow-up to my 6/25 posting “Dogs on wheels”, about the ambiguity between low attachment (LA) and high attachment (HA) of modifiers, as exemplified in a memic joke about a dog chasing people on a bicycle (in the LA reading, people on a bicycle are chased by the dog; in the HA reading, the dog chasing people is on a bicycle):
(#1) One version of the dogs-on-wheels joke
In that posting, I complained:
I was … sure that I’d seen a version of [the “dog chasing people on a bicycle” meme] and had posted about it; but then I couldn’t find it on any of my blogs or in the “to blog” files on my computer or in the “to blog” images on my desktop or in my stored albums of images. Much annoyed growling.
I surmised that I had indeed saved it for later posting, but then deleted the image and my notes on it in one of the necessary periodic purges of my “to blog” material.
Then, yesterday, I noticed an oddly named image on my desktop display of images (which, even pared down, is still sizable): MooseAttachment.jpg. This turned out to be a different memic joke exploiting a LA / HA ambiguity:
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Posted in Ambiguity, Jokes, Memes, Modifier attachment | 7 Comments »
May 31, 2024
To mark the eve of Pride Month, this digital composition passed on by Steven Levine on Facebook today:
Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, in the 7 ROY G. BIV, or Newtonian rainbow, colors, rather than the 6 Pride Flag colors — so the composition was probably not intended to celebrate the wonderful LGBTQ+ness of June; but let’s just disregard that
Now, the composition supplies a number of tokens of the Queen Elizabeth II type, so I had to consider whether my title for this posting would be Queen’s Pride (one QEII type) or Queens’ Pride (many QEII tokens). This is a familiar sort of problem, cropping up annually when Mother’s / Mothers’ Day and Father’s / Fathers’ Day come around, and I’ve chosen the same solution for my title that I chose for those two commercial holidays: axe the damn apostrophe. It’s Queens Pride.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Art, Color, Homosexuality, Language play, Memes, Modification, Puns, Rainbow, Spelling | Leave a Comment »
May 30, 2024
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro takes us to the world of talking tennis balls, where one of them commits a bathroom pun on the noun can ‘cylindrical metal container’:
(#1) Cylindrical metal containers are highly salient to tennis balls, because such cans are how they’re sold (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
Meanwhile, Wayno’s title for #1 — “Today’s Ballsy Cartoon” — offers a different pun, on (tennis) balls, a mildly raunchy one: ballsy ‘tough, courageous”, a derivative in –y (tricky < trick, mushy < mush, etc.) from crude slang balls ‘testicles’. And my title for this posting (“In the can”) offers another pun on cylindrical container can; from NOAD:
phrase in the can: informal on tape or film and ready to be broadcast or released: all went well, the film was in the can.
Now for some details.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Articles, Comic conventions, Furnishings and tools, Language and sports, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Puns, Slang, Taboo language and slurs, Trade names | Leave a Comment »
May 29, 2024
for the antepenultimate day of May …
A: The Mammoth Erection company, providing scaffolding design and erection services, based in the northern Toronto suburb of Aurora ON. A genuine company that’s been around for several decades but was only this afternoon brought to my attention (on Facebook). My delighted attention, given that I’m a serious fan of both mammoths (of the woolly sort) and erections (of the penile sort).
One of the company’s enormous trucks, for transporting piles of scaffolding material:
(#1) The company name embraces a pun on the adjective mammoth ‘huge’, as you can see from the company logo in close-up:
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Posted in Ambiguity, Language and the body, Logos, Mammoths, Names, Puns, Trade names | 2 Comments »
May 25, 2024
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro is a little treasure chest of interesting morphosemantics, all from a pun on marine biologist, whose everyday use is to refer to a scientist specializing in marine biology:
But instead we get, unexpectedly, a biologist who is a marine, assigned to duty monitoring aquatic animals (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
The pun has the USMC noun marine; its base has the sea adjective marine. But that’s just the beginning of the fun.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, Constructions, Derivation, Linguistics in the comics, Modification, Morphology and syntax, Puns | 3 Comments »
May 19, 2024
Today’s Sunday Bizarro by Dan Piraro, yet another Bizarro Psychiatrist cartoon, this time with a guy in need of a shrink ‘act of shrinking’, appealing to a shrink ‘headshrinker, psychotherapist’ (so it’s a pun cartoon too):
shrink ‘psychotherapist’ has become so ordinary a term in American English that its connection to the change-of-state verb shrink and the noun headshrinker is no longer salient to many speakers, with the result that the pun has some genuine surprise value (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page)
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Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Etymology, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture, Puns | Leave a Comment »
May 7, 2024
(Warning: this posting will immediately descend to crude jokiness on male genitals and masturbation, so it’s not to everyone’s taste)
To celebrate Masturbation Day, today’s notable occasion (in my household, every day is jack-off day, but the celebratory holiday comes around only once a year): the Zwicky Linemaster hose end pressure controller, from a vintage UK ad for aviation supplies (advertised on eBay), with its language repurposed here to cover the fluid pressure of ejaculation (which varies considerably in the male population, while being largely out of conscious control):
(#1) The ad from eBay, for some Zwicky Limited (of Buckinghamshire in southeast England) aircraft equipment, for controlling hose pressure during fueling
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Posted in Ambiguity, Furnishings and tools, Gay porn, Language and the body, Language of sex, Logos, Slogans | Leave a Comment »
May 1, 2024
🐇 🐇 🐇 from my 5/1/20 posting “Trois lapins pour le premier mai”:
It’s the first of the month, which I have learned to greet with three rabbits — by starting the day saying “rabbit, rabbit, rabbit”. More than that, it’s the first of May — by some cultural reckonings the beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere and also (in some countries) International Workers Day, so: dance around the maypole, set bonfires for Beltane or Walpurgis, prepare for outdoor bo(i)nking (rabbits again!), break out the lilies of the valley (muguets pour le premier mai), cue the choruses of L’Internationale, and march in solidarity with the workers. (Feel free to choose from this menu, as your taste inclines and your schedule allows.)
But enough of lapins; time to attend to our moutons, the sheep of the day being English NPs of the form N1 of N2 (like bouquet of flowers and tons of stuff) and how they work as subjects of clauses. These sheep came to us on 4/29 from Steven Levine, who wrote on Facebook:
Here’s a sentence I just came across that seems odd to my ears:
By the mid century a variety of celebrations was engaging morris dancers.
I know that the subject is variety [AZ: no no no; the subject is a variety of celebrations; this is important] and the verb is was, and yet it seems off to me — I was expecting were. I’m not asking for a grammatical analysis, I’m asking if this would stop you for a second if you were just reading along.
To which I wrote:
Steven said he didn’t want a grammatical analysis, but here it comes anyway.
I warned you.
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Posted in Agreement, Ambiguity, Argument structure, Constructions, Count & mass, Dialects, Grammatical categories, Holidays, Syntax | Leave a Comment »
April 13, 2024
Following up on yesterday’s pun cartoon by Scott Hilburn (in the posting “Out of nowhere, a rhino appeared and charged”), I looked at his (huge) portfolio of pun cartoons for others I hadn’t already posted on that were worthy of note, found several candidates I was mulling over (though I had quickly become sated with puns), and then ran aground on one I just didn’t really get:
(#1) Well, there’s evidence — the name Annie, that mop of curly red hair — that it involves Little Orphan Annie as a grown woman, with a young son, who she says can’t come out and play with the other boys today, but trills in song that her son will be coming out tomorrow, which is clearly a pun on sun, so there are all those parts, with a pun smack in the middle of the action, but it doesn’t hang together as a joke
But all the pointers are to Annie, the musical based on the comic strip, in which case it makes sense that I don’t get the joke, since I’m one of a select band of people who find the musical cloyingly unwatchable and consequently don’t recognize its songs, not even the plucky tyke’s anthem “Tomorrow” (which, it seems, is enormously popular; in preparing this posting, I have, alas, watched a number of performances of it, so that my judgment of it has crystallized to solid detestation). But, as I frequently note on this blog, if you don’t know the cultural context for the joke in a cartoon, you won’t understand the cartoon.
This time the ignorant cluck who didn’t get the joke was me. (Apparently, a large part of the Anglophone world recognizes the song.)
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Posted in Ambiguity, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Puns, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »
