Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
July 17, 2019
A surprise entry in the Chronicles: this Julia Suits cartoon in the (just-arrived) July 22nd New Yorker (apparently, these days, everybody is an avocadoist):
(#1) “No, you said you’d bring lemon juice!”
Lemon juice (or olive oli) acts as a protection against avocados browning on exposure to the air — a parallel to sunscreen protection.
(Note that, as in the “You complete me” cartoon — #6 in my 7/14/19 posting “Avocado Chronicles: 3 the chemical formula” — the sexes of the two avocado halves are identifiable, as male insertive (convex) vs. female receptive (concave), but in #1 it doesn’t really matter which of the two is speaking.)
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Posted in Comic conventions, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »
July 15, 2019
Although, or perhaps because, I live in one of the world’s avocado toast hot spots, I’d hoped to avoid posting on the silly fad for avotoast, but then this Mother Goose and Grimm cartoon — with its pun on toast — appeared in my comics feed:
(#1) Up off the counter and onto the table
Three things: avocados, toast, and avocado toast.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Child language, Culture, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | Leave a Comment »
July 14, 2019
Selling avocados in Santo Domingo DR:
(#1)
H2O KT is a play on Sp. aguacate ‘avocado’, treating it as:
the chemical formula H2O for agua ‘water’ + ca, the letter K /ka/, + te, the letter T /te/
that is, as la formula química del aguacate ‘the chemical formula for the avocado’. The joke isn’t quite perfect: K is indeed a symbol for a chemical element, potassium, but there’s no element T (though there is Te, the metalloid tellurium). (There is a compound potassium telluride, K2Te, but I don’t know how it interacts with water.)
The joke will lead us to the demotivational industry (with a penguin interlude); to snark and Mad magazine; to color blindness; to egg and avocado dishes; and to a sexually suggestive cartoon and its gender ideology.
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Posted in Chemistry, Gender and sexuality, Humor, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Penguins, Science, Spanish | 1 Comment »
July 12, 2019
Friday’s Wayno/Piraro collabo Bizarro strip (titled “Shaving Cream Pie”):
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
Ordinary barbers use shaving cream; clown barbers use cream pies. It’s just like spas: ordinary spas use facial creams (for moisturizing); clown spas use cream pies.
Bonus: the cartoon shows a clown barber twice over: a barber who is a clown, and also a barber for clowns.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Brevity vs. Clarity, Comic conventions, Compounds, Language play, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Morphology, Semantics of compounds | Leave a Comment »
July 8, 2019
The One Big Happy cartoon I posted about this morning, in “Nudie Tales”, had Ruthie mishearing new details as nudie tales. That reminded Gadi Niram of this Mexican cartoon (from the webcomic La Viñeta ‘The Vignette‘), turning on a similar mishearing:
(#1) con D de Dinamarca ‘with the D /de/ of Dinamarca (Denmark), with D as in Denmark’ misheard as Conde de Dinamarca ‘Count of Denmark’ (Denmark does have a number of counts): “Oh, sorry, I didn’t recognize you, Tavid, Count of Denmark”
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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Mishearings, Spanish | Leave a Comment »
July 8, 2019
The One Big Happy from 6/11 (in my comics feed today), in which Ruthie mishears a stock expression from tv news reporting:
Said: new details. Heard: nudie tales.
The stock expression is new details (sometimes more details, occasionally just details), frequently at 11 (because 11 p.m. is the conventional time for the late evening news in the US), but other times are of course possible (e.g. at 6), as are continuations like soon, later, and coming.
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Posted in Eggcorns, Formulaic language, Linguistics in the comics, Mishearings, Phonetics, Stock expressions | Leave a Comment »
