Archive for the ‘Language play’ Category

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Oblong man eats Normal salad

April 17, 2025

From Emily Menon Bender on Facebook today, with a bit of the menu at the restaurant Medici in Normal, in Normal IL:


[with EMB’s comment:] I’d keep making these puns too if I lived here

This following on a passing reference in my posting yesterday “Me lookee, no findee”Β to Kutztown State Normal School (as it was when I was a child), a state-supported teachers college in Kutztown PA, now Kutztown State University (that’s Kutz rhyming with puts, by the way; if you pronounce it to rhyme with putts, then in Pa. Dutch English, you’re talking about Barftown)

And with #1 echoing a famous headline announcing:

Oblong Man Marries Normal Woman

Oblong is a village in Crawford County IL. And Normal (as in #1) is a town in McLean County IL.

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Names, Puns, Teaching and learning | Leave a Comment »

Death comes for the appliances

April 14, 2025

πŸ’₯πŸ’₯ today is (Double) Disaster Day: (political disaster) Abraham Lincoln assassinated in 1865, (maritime disaster) the steamship Titanic striking an iceberg in 1912 (to sink the next day); and so the theme of today’s Bizarro cartoon is death, personified


A Grim Reaper cartoon meme made into a silly pun joke (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon β€” Wayno says there are 6 in this strip β€” see this Page)

(more…)

Posted in Comic conventions, Events and occasions, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Memes, Puns, Silliness | Leave a Comment »

Today’s magnificent pun

April 13, 2025

[In the constant upheavals of my life and the world around me, I’m now just picking random stuff to post about, from the 60 or 70 items in my ever-expanding queue — whatever catches my fancy at the moment. Don’t try to make sense of it as a whole.]

Jim Horwitz’s Watson cartoon for 4/9 (it came to me on Facebook, which has its own peculiar ways of delivering postings, today, 4/13):


Ingeniously outrageous: Batman and Robin turned into food containers

(more…)

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Phonology, Puns, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

The light hand and the hammer

April 6, 2025

On Easter egg quotations — the light hand — vs. ostentatious allusions — the hammer — in the Economist. From the issue of 3/15/25 in the Culture section, a review of Righting Wrongs, by lawyer Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, with main headline

How to shame a dictator

(vague echoes of titles whisper in your head) and just one section head (in bold face)

The gripes of Roth

(clang clang clang and you groan at the outrageous pun).

And now I’ll riff on these two allusions. But first, the background.

(more…)

Posted in Allusion, Books, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Puns, Quotations, Rhyme, Titles | 4 Comments »

Vito Corleone and Jimmy Hoffa walk into a formula pun joke

April 1, 2025

πŸ‡ πŸ‡ πŸ‡ three rabbits to inaugurate the cruelest month; today is not only April Fools Day, but also noted linguist Leonard Bloomfield’s birthday (in 1897), to be celebrated by a look at his work on Menomini / Menominee, an Algonquian / Algonkian language of Wisconsin

Revived on Facebook recently, this 3/31/22 Pearls Before Swine comic strip:


(#1) A Stephan Pastis specialty, the formula pun — or setup / payoff pun — joke

Two things here: the joke form, and the popular-culture knowledge needed to appreciate this specific strip.

(more…)

Posted in Events and occasions, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Linguists, Movies and tv, Pop culture, Puns, Quotations | 1 Comment »

Hybrid portmanteaus

March 31, 2025

πŸ…Β πŸ…Β πŸ… three tigers for ultimate March, the day on which the tigers eat the lambs that the month proverbially goes out as; my posting for this morning begins with tigers, but only so I can slide into the real topic:

the hybrid portmanteau ‘a portmanteau (name) for a hybrid (creature)’ — as in the names liger (lion + tiger) ‘hybrid of a male lion with a tigress’ and tigon (tiger + lion) ‘hybrid of a male tiger with a lioness’, as opposed to unmixed names for hybrids, like mule ‘hybrid of a male donkey and female horse’ and hinny ‘hybrid of a male horse and a female donkey’. Hybrid portmanteaus are iconically satisfying: intimate name-melding (through the combination of word-parts) signifies intimate creature-melding (through mating).

From this beginning, I will rapidly descend to the hybrid portmanteau triceradoodle (the creature is a preposterous hybrid of a triceratops and a poodle) and eventually to the double hybrid portmanteau composite Gerberian Shepsky (an actual dog breed, a hybrid of a German shepherd and a Siberian husky)

(more…)

Posted in Cartoonists, Events and occasions, Language and animals, Language play, Lexical semantics, Libfixes, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Portmanteaus, Semantics | 2 Comments »

Nosferatutu II

March 17, 2025

☘️ ☘️ ☘️ three shamrocks for St. Patrick’s Day

On the WaynoBlog for 3/15/25, W commented on the Bizarro cartoon of his that I reported on in my posting yesterday, “Nosferatu en pointe”:

I recently saw another vampire cartoon with the caption NOSFERATUTU. Worse, it was done by a good friend, Teresa Roberts Logan, who has an excellent cartoon feature called Laughing Redhead. Worse still, she did her comic in 2021! At least the two aren’t precisely the same…

Fortunately, she was very understanding about this type of occurrence, which happens to all of us from both directions. It’s still embarrassing, though!

(more…)

Posted in Events and occasions, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Nosferatu en pointe

March 16, 2025

After six days of foolishness, back on 1/19, in my posting “Hats off to vampires!”, Bizarro produced what I supposed to be the last of the Waynoratu Nosferamanteaus. But yesterday (3/15), two months later, the vampire arose once more, dancing across the stage of our imagination:


I suppose this was irresistible, but the TU of Nosferatu beckons far too seductively (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon β€” Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip β€” see this Page)

We might now get

Nosferatuber, Nosferatumor, Nosferatush, Nosferatutor, Nosferatutti-fruitti, …

NosferaTurin, NosferaTuring, NosferaTurkey, NosferaTuscany, NosferaTutsi, …

And endless more, streaming out the door and flying bat-like towards the moon.

 

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Slices of pi(e)

March 15, 2025

π πŸ₯§ Ο€ πŸ₯§ Ο€ πŸ₯§ for yesterday (mammoths lumber along majestically, and they are often regrettably late for appointments), 3/14, which was Pi Day in my country, and for some years now, also — delicious pun — Pie Day in many places (so inviting a cascade of formulaic word play: pie in the sky, a piece of the pie, easy as pie, even pie chart)

I’ll jump right into things with a charming and heartfelt Facebook message yesterday from my old friend Paula Stout, who many years ago lived in Palo Alto, but has since moved to the great American Southwest — on a ranch outside Greenville TX, east of Dallas-Fort Worth:

Happy Ecstatic Friday on Pi Day (3.14)

We were in town today, where every store treated the day as a celebration. They were giving away apple pies, chicken pot pies, [pizza pies,] and even eskimo pies. With big smiles, balloons and jubilation.

And it struck me that we are seeing history unfold.

1988 was the first “Pi Day” for a marketing campaign in SF, iirc. Before that, only we geeks and friends of the wonderful Kevin McHargue (who was born on this day) partied it up

And now, here we are. A national holiday of pies!

As David Mamet, renowned playwright, once noted, “We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.”

There’s enough stress brewing in the world, y’all, let us pray he is right and there is pie enough to combat it.

(more…)

Posted in Allusion, Events and occasions, Language and food, Language play, Mathematics, Movies and tv, My life, Parody, Puns, Rhyme | Leave a Comment »

The knuckle nick

February 23, 2025

Or: who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?

A report from Monday 2/17, when in the morning, while getting breakfast, I must have knocked my right hand against something with a sharp edge to it and nicked it (without any pain, so I didn’t realize it had happened) — because, when I looked down at the first knuckle, a bright bead of blood had welled up and was about to run down my hand. I grabbed some kleenex, wrapped it around the wound, and went to the bathroom to get a bandaid to cover the wound until the blood had clotted. (Clotting takes a while because I take a blood thinner — for atrial fibrillation, which seems to have vanished — which also means I have tons of bruises where I knock up against things with one bodypart or another. Medical treatments, side effects, it’s a balancing act.)

The day ticked on. Late in the afternoon, checking my Facebook page before getting up to assemble some dinner, I looked down, and my right hand was entirely covered with blood, which was streaming onto the pad under my keyboard. Onto my mousepad. And onto the tabletop. Blood everywhere, Jesus fuck. I must have knocked the scab loose against something, again without any warning pain, it was so minor. (No, I had not lost sensation in my fingers, that would have been truly scary.)

(more…)

Posted in Formulaic language, Language and medicine, Language and the body, Language play, My life, Narrative, Quotations | 2 Comments »

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