Archive for the ‘Language and animals’ Category
April 20, 2024
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro is a Psychiatrist cartoon with a stylized tunafish on the couch:
(#1) To understand this cartoon, you need to recognize that the patient’s not any old tuna, but Charlie, the celebrity mascot for the StarKist brand, whose widely advertised decades-long goal in life is to taste good (while — sorry, Charlie — his pursuit of good taste constantly frustrates this ambition, an experience that seems have led him to seek therapy) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page)
There’s a surprisingly rich history here (but one that might be specifically North American, so that the cartoon might be baffling to many of my readers). Summarized in this entry on the tv tropes site:
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Posted in Catchphrases, Language and animals, Language and food, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Mascots, Signs and symbols, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »
April 19, 2024
… Wayno’s title for today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, which I think of “MobyDicPOP”, to recognize the phrasal overlap portmanteau Moby Dictionary in it:
Moby Dick + dictionary (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
Easy to imagine other DicPOPs: Tricky Dictionary, for Richard Nixon’s pungent vocabulary of contempt and abuse; Private Dictionary, for the lexicon of private eyes; Pencil Dictionary, for a list of famous men with thin penises; and so on.
I suppose it’s merely caviling to note that a Moby Dictionary should be huge, and white.
Posted in Books, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus | 3 Comments »
April 9, 2024
Aka: Piccolo’s bull and Rubin’s cow: cattle days in CartoonLand. A little post-eclipse diversion: cartoons that make allusion to, or illustrate a pun on, some formulaic expression, but without actually mentioning that expression, so they present challenges in cartoon understanding. Two that have come by me recently: a Rina Piccolo Rhymes With Orange cartoon of 4/5 (alluding to the idiom bull in a china shop, which is something of a favorite of cartoonists); and an old Leigh Rubin Rubes cartoon that re-surfaced in Facebook (punning on the nursery-rhyme line the cow jumped over the moon).
Oh, I’ve given it all away. Well, you can still appreciate Piccolo’s and Rubin’s ingenuity.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Formulaic language, Idioms, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Nonsense, Puns, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
April 1, 2024
🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the new month, 🃏 🃏 🃏 three jokers for April Fool’s Day, and 🌼 🌼 🌼 three jaunes d’Avril. yellow flowers of April, all this as we turn on a dime from yesterday’s folk-custom bunnies of Easter to today’s monthly rabbits; for this intensely leporine occasion, a Maria Scrivan hare-pun cartoon:
(#1) (phonologically perfect) pun hare on model hair, taking advantage of I love what you’ve done with your hair as an common exemplar of the stock expression (I) love what you’ve done with X; a cartoon posted on Facebook by Probal Dasgupta, who reported, “Even I groaned at this one”
Things to talk about here: my use of turn on a dime just above; Easter + April Fool’s; the yellow flowers of April (which will bring us to Jane Avril — Fr. Avril ‘April’); and the stock expression (I) love what you’ve done with X.
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Posted in Art, Color, Constructions, Dancers, Formulaic language, French, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and plants, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Pragmatics, Puns, Signs and symbols, Speech acts, Stock expressions, Style and register, Syntax | 1 Comment »
March 27, 2024
(Male bodies, one full frontal, allusions to sex between men — not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
On the male art of the young NYC artist Todd Yeager (recently encountered in Pinterest, though his drawings have been featured in Advocate magazine several times). Especially devoted to faun / satyr / goat-god Pan images (you can pretty much smell the sex on them), male buttocks and penises, and loving male couples (and to chronicling his domestic life and the street life of NYC). Also to self-portraits of many kinds; well, he’s a good-looking hunky young man who can do pensive or flagrantly sexy, as it suits him. Here’s a sexy one: boots, buttocks, and profile (really big boots):
(#1) Self-portrait With Boots and Jock
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Posted in Art, Homosexuality, Language and animals, Language and the body, Male art, Myths | 1 Comment »
March 23, 2024
An old One Big Happy strip in my comics feed today — posted here on 3/28/14 in “OBH roundup”, but with little comment — in which Ruthie reveals her aide-memoire for the name of a fish her mother sometimes cooks for dinner:
(#1) buncher, crowder? — or flocker, packer, ganger, batcher, schooler? — but actually grouper
At this point, you’re probably thinking that groupers are so called because they travel in schools, that is, in a kind of group. But no; there’s an etymological surprise here.
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Posted in Etymology, Language and animals, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Memory, Portuguese, Semantics of compounds | Leave a Comment »
March 3, 2024
In today’s Bizarro, a dog park, with parking meters, where you can park your pooch by the hour:
Surprise! The strip exploits a possible sense of the N+N compound dog park — roughly, ‘an area or building where dogs may be left temporarily, for a fee’, the canine analogue of (largely British) car park ‘an area or building where cars or other vehicles may be left temporarily; a parking lot or parking garage’ (NOAD) — that you probably had never imagined.
Instead, you expected the everyday sense of dog park, ‘a park for dogs to exercise and play off-leash in a controlled environment under the supervision of their owners’ (Wikipedia) — a Use compound with the general meaning ‘park for dogs (to use)’, but coming with a sociocultural context that in practice conveys something considerably more specific.
Now, more details on everyday dog parks, and Bizarro dog parks too.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, Derivation, Language and animals, Lexicography, Linguistics in the comics, Nouning, Semantics of compounds | 2 Comments »
February 10, 2024
For this lunar new year, today the rabbit hops away and the dragon flies in, as it does every 12 years. I am a dragon (born in 1940, 7 cycles ago), so for new year I have installed a cute stuffed dragon by my work space. Here’s Sandra Boynton’s celebratory artwork for the occasion (passed on to me by Chris Ambidge), with more cute dragons:
Gung hei fat choi / Gong xi fa cai
The full cycle: 1 rat, 2 ox, 3 tiger, 4 rabbit, 5 dragon, 6 snake / serpent, 7 horse, 8 goat, 9 monkey, 10 rooster, 11 dog, 12 pig
Posted in Art, Calendars, Holidays, Language and animals | 1 Comment »
January 23, 2024
The Dale Coverly Speed Bump cartoon of 4/24/18, with a fresh take on dogs to beware of: not vicious guard or attack dogs, but hyperkinetic emotional-support dogs overwhelming passing pedestrians by lavishing empathetic concern on them:
(#1) An especially nice touch is the dog saying — this is cartoonland, where animals talk, in English — that it can smell the hurt, the cluster of emotional states that give off markers that many dogs can in fact smell and interpret
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Posted in Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Signage | Leave a Comment »
January 19, 2024
I recently discovered (through friends on Facebook) that 1/16 is Appreciate a Dragon Day — an excellent occasion, in my view. How do I appreciate my dragon? Let me count the ways.
One, dragons have picked up a ton of gay vibes (there are lots of rainbow dragons around, many on the cute side, but some fierce), and I am way gay; two, a Year of the Dragon is the upcoming year (beginning on 2/10/24) in the 12-year cycle of the lunar calendar and I am in fact a dragon, born in the dragon year 1940; and three, since dragons are (fanciful) gigantic serpents, they are natural phallic symbols, really big and powerful penises (the objects of my desire), frequently with wings, and that means they slot right into my sexual fantasies. Il y a un dragon dans mon lit!
(#1) On the kisspng images site: a rainbow Chinese dragon, by Oluoko
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Posted in Art, Books, Calendars, French, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and the body, Language of sex, My life, Phallicity, Signs and symbols | 1 Comment »
