Archive for the ‘Puns’ Category
May 3, 2017
Today’s Rhymes With Orange, which presents the reader with a challenge in understanding. You need to know something about music, and a lot about urban life:
(#1)
That’s a grand piano on a cinder block, with its lid propped open by a shovel, on the grassy lawn (BrE garden) in front of the house; and there’s a BEWARE OF DOG sign, indicating the presence of a guard dog. Signs of urban blight (see the title of the cartoon), decline, diminishment (a diminuendo). All very troubling (in musical Punnish, treble-ing) to the musical old couple walking by.
(more…)
Posted in Language and class, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Understanding comics, Verbing | Leave a Comment »
April 18, 2017
On Pinterest this morning, this Grim Reaper cartoon by Myke Ashley-Cooper (under the name Ashley Cooper):
(#1)
A pun on death/deaf or a mishearing, take your pick.
This cartoon led me to Ashley-Cooper’s site, which announces:
This Humor Website is about
Funny Cartoons and Funny Pictures as well as
Crazy Jokes and Animations
(many of them based on puns and wordplays). And that led me to Ashley-Cooper’s take-off on a famous painting:
(more…)
Tags:`
Posted in Art, Clothing, Comic conventions, Fashion, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | Leave a Comment »
April 14, 2017
Today’s Zippy (for a change, not alluding in any way to POTUS):
Zippy and Griffy are headless in Hyannis, or somewhere. Headless and therefore mindless. They are briefly Zippyized in panel 3, where they are subject to Martinization and Sanforization, before Zippy urges them in the last panel to return to their everyday identities (like vampires or werewolves, they change back at dawn), and Griffy commits a very silly pun (close-minded / clothes-minded).
(more…)
Posted in Derivation, Linguistics in the comics, Morphology, Puns | Leave a Comment »
April 13, 2017
The latest bulletin from Pinterest featured a Reaper Jokes board maintained by Kathy-Lynn Cross. More Grim Reaper cartoons, including one that especially caught my eye because of the two idioms in the text. A Mark Parisi showing one (angry) Reaper confronting another (disconsolate) Reaper: “I’ve had it with you! From now on, you’re alive to me!”. Nice reversal of the idiomatic you’re dead to me ‘I disown you, cut you off, will never see or speak to you again’. Spoken by Death to Death, you’re alive to me conveys the same.
More on this cartoon, then two more Grim Reapers, to add to the 14 already posted on this blog; it’s a very popular cartoon meme.
(more…)
Posted in Comic conventions, Idioms, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Tongue twisters | Leave a Comment »
April 11, 2017
A Scott Hilburn cartoon on Pinterest this morning:
(#1)
A pun on irritable bowel syndrome. The vowel letters I, A, and O are angry, throwing the letter L out of their club because he’s not a vowel. (The play on Get the hell out of here is a bonus.) Note that this is all about vowel letters, not vowels. (Depending on the dialect, speakers of English have a dozen or so distinct vowels, that is, vowel phonemes.)
(more…)
Posted in Language of medicine, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | Leave a Comment »
March 13, 2017
Caught during a Prairie Home Companion re-run on the radio yesterday: a joke set-up for the burgers of Calais (referring to hamburgers), punning on Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais (his extraordinary bronze sculpture).
(more…)
Posted in Art, Language and food, Puns | 1 Comment »
March 13, 2017
From a posting by Randy Murray to the Facebook page “THE ERRORIST MOVEMENT – Correct grammar, with humour”, where he comments, “apostrophes mean so much”:
(#1)
At first glance, this ad would seem to fall into four big topic areas on this blog: dubious commercial names; It’s All Grammar; vulgar slang; and phallic play (in particular, word play). To which I add: the conventions on the form of hashtags, e-mail addresses, and web addresses (URLs). But first, I have to tell you that this particular Dick’s Pizza is a fabrication.
(more…)
Posted in Double entendres, Language and animals, Language of advertising, Language play, Movies and tv, Names, Phallicity, Punctuation, Puns, Spelling, Taboo language and slurs, Usage advice, Usage attitudes | 4 Comments »
March 10, 2017
(Otherwise known as In Search of Lost Mustard.)
Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm:
(#1)
A bilingual pun, with the flavor of a portmanteau: Dijon (mustard) + déjà vu.
(more…)
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Puns | 1 Comment »
March 10, 2017
First encountered on Pinterest this morning, what is apparently a new rage in texties: jokes told by a cute husky pup (rather than, say, a llama, a penguin, an eel, or Ryan Gosling), for example this one:
(#1)
(more…)
Posted in Jokes, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »
(#1)
