Today’s Zippy:
Thing is, past pluperfect is redundant, since pluperfect in English grammar is a synonym of past perfect.. As a result, grammars of Engish don’t treat past pluperfect as a technical term at all.
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
past pluperfect
November 6, 2020Can I get you a vole or two?
October 30, 2020On Facebook, Joelle Stepien Baillard posted an old cartoon (pubished 8/8/94) by New Yorker cartoonist Sam Gross:
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A cartoon with a translation from one world to another. There’s the world of cats, in which they go outside to hunt small animals; and then, simultaneously, the world of (human) household relationships, in which someone going out on an errand will often ask if they can get something for the others while they’re out.
That gives us a talking cat.
Shifting gears
October 23, 2020The cover of the latest (10/26/20) New Yorker, which I post here only because it’s sweet and coronavirus-relevant:
Desert island discs
October 20, 2020The Wayno/Piraro Bizarro of 10/19, with yet another variant of the Desert Island cartoon meme:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
The allusion is (ultimately) to the BBC 4 radio program(me) Desert Island Discs.
The Gauld scientific method
October 19, 2020
The xkcd dialect quiz
October 19, 2020A recent xkcd cartoon (#2372) plays with the sort of questionnaire that lexicographers and linguists have long used for investigating dialect differences:
Flesh Gordon
October 18, 2020Frank Abate points me to a 10/18 article in the Guardian: “Flesh Gordon? Artwork reveals erotic version that was never made: Draft designs for a planned Nicolas Roeg sci-fi movie in 1979 finally see the light of day” by Dalya Alberge:
(#1) Artwork for the abandoned film depicts Flash Gordon confronting Ming the Merciless on top of the emperor’s royal spaceship. Photograph: StudioCanal / King Features Inc.
One more Magritte homage
October 16, 2020From Vadim Temkin on Facebook on the 14th:
One more homage to Magritte: Lovers II [now with naked men]. I think for now I have enough Magritte for a while
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More onomatomania
October 14, 2020Today’s Zippy:
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From NOAD:
noun dodecahedron: a three-dimensional shape having twelve plane faces, in particular a regular solid figure with twelve equal pentagonal faces.