Yesterday’s and today’s Bizarro strips:
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(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoons — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in both strips — see this Page.)
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
1 Bizarro, 2 Bizarro
May 25, 2017“Farley”, the dog said, “get me a slice”
May 23, 2017Three cartoons in today’s feed: a Bizarro with a talking dog; a One Big Happy with a slice that OMG might grow into a pizza; and a Zippy riff on Farley Granger and They Live by Night:
Prepositions matter
May 22, 2017Today’s Zits:
V + P~Ø (V with oblique object, marked by a P, vs. a direct object, with no P) was the topic of my 2009 Stanford SemFest paper; detailed handout here.
Audiences
May 21, 2017Two recent cartoons, a One Big Happy in which the grandmother copes with black street speech with an app for her audience; and a Doonesbury in which marijuana companies tailor their products and their advertising for gay and black audiences.
X with some X on the side and some X poured on top
May 20, 2017Today’s Zippy, on the theme (more or less) of single-mindedness:
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The food is standard diner fare: meat loaf, grilled cheese sandwiches. And the diner is the South Street Diner in Boston, which touts its reputation.
Brainless Tales, with more news for penises
May 20, 2017#4 in my “Squid Pro Quo” posting is from Marcus Connor’s Brainless Tales, a new webcomic for me, but one largely devoted to language play. And immediately I came across this cartoon, with a portmanteau noun denoting a hybrid, doubly phallic, foodstuff:
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baniener = banana + wiener, denoting a decidedly louche anthromorphized banana-wiener. Hey, baby, wanna dance?
Squid Pro Quo
May 20, 2017This Non Sequitur cartoon by Wiley Miller:
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squid / quid. And squid as a source of ink, squid as food. .
Ruthie faces the unfamiliar, again
May 19, 2017The One Big Happy in my comics feed today:
Rockefellers / rocky fellows. How was Ruthie to know her grandmother was using a proper name? And fellers is a familiar dialect variant for fellows – and an old one (Americans have been labeling feller an “impropriety” or “provincialism”, with an “excrescent” r, since at least 1795, according to DARE).
Ruthie undoubtedly also didn’t know that the Rockefeller family has long been seen as the richest family in the world, hence as the, um, gold standard of wealth. Which gives We’re no / not Rockefellers as an idiom meaning, roughly, ‘We’re not rich’.
Presentation and perception
May 18, 2017
Names in the comics
May 15, 2017The One Big Happy in today’s comics feed:
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Ouch: Creighton Barrel / Crate & Barrel.
There’s quite a path in the history of Creighton as a first name. This will take us to probably the most famous person with first name Creighton, US Army General Creighton W. Abrams — and his son Creighton W. Abrams, a classmate of mine at Princeton.
