Archive for the ‘Comic conventions’ Category
August 1, 2020
For we will sit together as happy as can be
For I’ll tickle Nancy, and Nancy’ll tickle me
— Uncle Dave Macon’s “I’ll Tickle Nancy” (apparently first recorded in 1935)
Yesterday’s (7/31) Wayno/Piraro Bizarro strip, in which Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy character takes up textual analysis (Wayno’s title:”Beating Around the Bushmiller”), explaining the intricacies of cartoon characters to her buddy Sluggo (and of course the three rocks):
(#1) On the Bushmiller rocks, see my 9/2/17 posting “Three rocks”, with a Zippy strip in which the rocks talk (and if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
Pretty much the purest form of cartoon self-reference: a cartoon character expounding on the nature of cartoon characters. (Also note Sluggo’s body language, with his hands in his pockets, often conveying disaffection or suspicion.)
What follows is about Nancys and, especially, nancies.
(more…)
Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Music, Taboo language and slurs | 5 Comments »
July 23, 2020
Yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, a Psychiatrist strip (Wayno’s title: “Out of Frame”):
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)
And now we’re in the world of phobias, extreme or irrational fears of or aversions to particular things. People are exceptionally fond of finding or inventing unusual phobias — and, correspondingly, of finding or inventing unusual philias (attachments, especially sexually fetishistic attachments, to particular things).
Fear of furniture, as it turns out, is real but rare. There is even a celebrity afflicted with it.
(more…)
Posted in Actors, Comic conventions, Greek, Linguistics in the comics, Technical and ordinary language | 1 Comment »
July 15, 2020
Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro strip (Wayno’s title: “Farm to Slab”):
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
A combination of two cartoon memes: the familiar Caveman meme, plus a Remarkable Restaurant meme that’s a specialty of the Bizarro strips.
Plus the portmanteau word play in filet magnon (filet mignon + cro-magnon). And a subtle play on a systematic ambiguity between raw and cooked understandings in certain food names, in particular for cuts of meat. You ask for a filet at the Paleo Cafe, you get a hunk of raw meat.
(more…)
Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Language in advertising, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Metonymy, Portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »
June 24, 2020
Playing with ambiguity:
— a One Big Happy cartoon with: I feel like a tuna fish sandwich
— a domestic exchange about: I will make a dessert of my youth
— a Pearls Before Swine cartoon with: Tell me roughly
— a photograph, labeled Schrödinger’s Dumpster, of a dumpster with the signage: EMPTY WHEN FULL
(more…)
Posted in Abbreviation, Adverbs, Allusion, Ambiguity, Argument structure, Comic conventions, Conlangs, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Signage | 4 Comments »
June 16, 2020
Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro collabo, with a groaner pun on the name F. Scott Fitzgerald (the American writer) plus an instance of the Pavlov cartoon meme:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
The pun is straightforward (it does depend on your recognizing Spot as a conventional name for dogs in English); but though Pavlov isn’t mentioned in the cartoon, it’s all about classical, or Pavlovian, conditioning, and the cartoon makes no sense unless you recognize the allusion to Pavlov, and also recall that Pavlov conditioned his dogs to salivate (and expect food) on hearing a bell ringing (here, the carriage return bell on a typewriter, which younger readers will be unfamiliar with, typewriters being an obsolete technology — but the cartoon helpfully fills in this bit of typewriter arcana).
(more…)
Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Psychology, Puns, Understanding comics | 1 Comment »
June 7, 2020
Annals of pandemic vocabulary: the N + N compound tribute time ‘a time (moment in a day) for tribute’, specialized for a specific form of tribute (largely, clapping) to a specific group of tributees (medical workers). The practice has been around for several months, but the label seems to have emerged more recently (I don’t have the resources to track these things down), and now it figures in today’s wry Doonesbury cartoon, about Zonker Harris and his nephew Zipper:
(#1)
(more…)
Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Semantics of compounds | 1 Comment »
June 5, 2020
The 5/27 Wayno/Piraro Bizarro collabo brings us two Grim Reapers confronting what might be a trap for them:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
If you want to catch Death in a trap, what do you use as bait? Obviously, not the conventional chunk of cheese, but dead cheese: moldy cheese. (Moldy cheese is, of course, not actually dead; in fact, the cheese is alive with the swarms of microbes.)
The cartoon nicely exploits an ambiguity, between the semantics of the conventionalized compound death trap / deathtrap, and the semantics of a compound Death trap, parallel to mouse trap / mousetrap.
(more…)
Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Compounds, Language and food, Language and medicine, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Semantics, Semantics of compounds | 1 Comment »
May 30, 2020
Passed on by Jeff Bowles on FB today, this Pearls Before Swine cartoon from 2017:
By far the most outrageous elaborate pun I’ve seen from Pastis (others can be found in the Page on Pearls Before Swine on this blog). Set up bit by bit, accreting the components of the monstrously complex result. In a different order from the final result, of course, so you can’t appreciate where it’s going,
And then Pastis’s usual meta move in the last panel, in which the characters recognize that they’re in a cartoon. In this case, Rat produces Abraham Lincoln (and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”) to berate Pastis for his word play.
Posted in Comic conventions, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | 4 Comments »
April 25, 2020
By JAK (Jason Adam Katzenstein), the New Yorker daily cartoon from yesterday:
“Personally, I worry that, with everyone wearing masks, readers won’t be able to tell who in the cartoon is speaking.”
The masks are part of daily life in plague time, and they conceal the wearers’ mouths. So in a cartoon you can’t tell who’s speaking. (In real life, there might be other clues, like vocal timbre.)
(more…)
Posted in Comic conventions, Definiteness, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics | 2 Comments »
