Passed on by Benita Bendon Campbell, the One Big Happy for yesterday, as it appeared in the Denver Post:
The snowclone Play One, in which the central figure denies that she is an old lady — that’s not how she perceives herself — while conceding that she plays one in real life.
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Snowclones | Leave a Comment »
Marsupials are from Mars, according to Ruthie in One Big Happy:
Faced with marsupial, which looks like it has Mars as its first element (and sounds pretty close to that), Ruthie chops out the Mars and comes up with a second element upial. So she’s treating the whole word as a N + N compound, which means that upial is the head N, and if the compound is as simple as possible, it’s subsective: a marsupial is then a kind of upial — a variety from Mars.
Ruthie has then given marsupial the demi-eggcorn treatment, analyzing Mars in it and flying with the possibility that upial is an English noun (with a meaning she doesn’t happen to know).
Posted in Compounds, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Snowclones | 1 Comment »
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