Today’s Dilbert:
“May I speak frankly?” is one of those seriously ominous questions: the person who asks it is ready to unload some very unpleasant frank opinions, as above. Even worse, it’s very difficult to say “No” to this question — because it doesn’t really function like a yes-no question, but at best serves to ask for permission to speak, and even then presumes that the permission will be granted, so that its effect is to announce that you’re going to speak.
From Wondermark on 9/9/14:
(#1)
From blogger Tegiminis (“Game critic, writer, big gay robot” in Seattle WA) on the site Simplikation (“Heaps of words on games, culture, and media in general”) on 11/20/14: “Why Sealioning Is Bad”:
Chances are you’ve seen this comic by David Malki if you frequent Twitter at all these days. It even coined a new verb – “sealioning” – to describe the act of jumping into a discussion with demands for evidence and answers to questions.
But why is it an awful thing to do? Why do people react so negatively to a request for evidence? Surely a reasoned, rational person would acquiesce to such a statement!
Well, no.
Yesterday’s alarming Dilbert:
Dilbert finds himself enmeshed in a relationship with the Internet monster Dick, who hacks at the underpinnings of cooperative conversation.
On Language Log, a posting of today’s xkdc, #1483 on Quotative Like, posted by Geoff Pullum under the title “Linguists get tough on promoting language change”. And then from Mike Pope, a pointer to an earlier xkcd of linguistic interest that I’d missed:
One of Randall Munroe’s cartoons on how to annoy people.
Another quotation postcard from Jane Austen (from Chris Ambidge), this time with some genuine linguistic interest:
Chris disagreed with the quotation (he and I are dependable correspondents, at least for one another) — but then this is not an expression of Jane’s own opinion, but a statement by one of her characters, which is quite a different thing. From Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon, which is about (among other things) the creation of a new English seaside town in the early 19th century.
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.
Cartoon traffic since the five items I talked about in this posting: a Bizarro on passwords, then and now; a Benjamin Schwartz New Yorker cartoon on Canadian eh; a One Big Happy on God talk; and a Zippy on Dagwood (Bumstead).
Today’s Zippy continues the traditional Czech triplecoat theme from here:
Though there’s an asterisk on that bit of Czech, suggesting that there’s a translation somewhere, I haven’t found it (though Oh, bože is ‘Oh, God’) — but a commenter on the Zippy site suggests ‘freak’ as a translation of śilenec, and Google offers ‘madman’. So, roughly: ‘Oh God, a crazy!’