Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
March 31, 2025
🐅 🐅 🐅 three tigers for ultimate March, the day on which the tigers eat the lambs that the month proverbially goes out as; my posting for this morning begins with tigers, but only so I can slide into the real topic:
the hybrid portmanteau ‘a portmanteau (name) for a hybrid (creature)’ — as in the names liger (lion + tiger) ‘hybrid of a male lion with a tigress’ and tigon (tiger + lion) ‘hybrid of a male tiger with a lioness’, as opposed to unmixed names for hybrids, like mule ‘hybrid of a male donkey and female horse’ and hinny ‘hybrid of a male horse and a female donkey’. Hybrid portmanteaus are iconically satisfying: intimate name-melding (through the combination of word-parts) signifies intimate creature-melding (through mating).
From this beginning, I will rapidly descend to the hybrid portmanteau triceradoodle (the creature is a preposterous hybrid of a triceratops and a poodle) and eventually to the double hybrid portmanteau composite Gerberian Shepsky (an actual dog breed, a hybrid of a German shepherd and a Siberian husky)
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Posted in Cartoonists, Events and occasions, Language and animals, Language play, Lexical semantics, Libfixes, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Portmanteaus, Semantics | 2 Comments »
March 22, 2025
… and call it Cochon de lait rôti. Put a mouth on that green apple and call it Le fils de l’homme. Mash them together in a nightmare and you get today’s Bizarro strip, a Wayno Psychiatrist cartoon that’s a re-play of an earlier Bizarro, but with the dream figure of William Tell’s son (with an apple on his head) replaced by a roasted wild boar (with an apple in its mouth):
(#1) Surrealist René Magritte’s Son of Man on the therapist’s couch (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
Two things here: apples in the mouths of roasted pigs (as in the patient’s nightmare); and the previous Bizarro strip (from 2022), with the same patient and the same therapist (a caricature of the artist Magritte), positioned differently in the strip, and suffering from dramatically different nightmares.
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Posted in Allusion, Art, Comic conventions, French, Language and animals, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Quotations, Surrealism, Switzerland and Swiss things, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »
March 21, 2025
Or, as I will eventually call them, family words — that is, private words, words we use only with some people who are close to us, close like family, words like the verb Cawnthorpe ‘look’ (I will, eventually, explain this; you don’t get it because it’s not your family word — or mine, either). My ultimate goal in this posting is family-word material from Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett’s Way with Words newsletter this very morning, but I’m going to edge up slowly to private words through private meanings (for common words, like ritzy used to mean ‘expensively stylish’) and eggcorns (a colorful label for private forms for common words, like eggcorn for acorn ‘nut of an oak tree’).
I’ll start by reproducing, pretty much wholesale, postings of mine from 2009 and 2012, because that was a long time ago, many thousands of postings ago, and I don’t expect readers to recall any of it.
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Posted in Eggcorns, Errors, Linguistics in the comics, Misreadings | 3 Comments »
March 17, 2025
☘️ ☘️ ☘️ three shamrocks for St. Patrick’s Day
On the WaynoBlog for 3/15/25, W commented on the Bizarro cartoon of his that I reported on in my posting yesterday, “Nosferatu en pointe”:
I recently saw another vampire cartoon with the caption NOSFERATUTU. Worse, it was done by a good friend, Teresa Roberts Logan, who has an excellent cartoon feature called Laughing Redhead. Worse still, she did her comic in 2021! At least the two aren’t precisely the same…
Fortunately, she was very understanding about this type of occurrence, which happens to all of us from both directions. It’s still embarrassing, though!
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Posted in Events and occasions, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Puns | Leave a Comment »
March 16, 2025
After six days of foolishness, back on 1/19, in my posting “Hats off to vampires!”, Bizarro produced what I supposed to be the last of the Waynoratu Nosferamanteaus. But yesterday (3/15), two months later, the vampire arose once more, dancing across the stage of our imagination:
I suppose this was irresistible, but the TU of Nosferatu beckons far too seductively (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
We might now get
Nosferatuber, Nosferatumor, Nosferatush, Nosferatutor, Nosferatutti-fruitti, …
NosferaTurin, NosferaTuring, NosferaTurkey, NosferaTuscany, NosferaTutsi, …
And endless more, streaming out the door and flying bat-like towards the moon.
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Puns | Leave a Comment »
March 13, 2025
The title of today’s Bizarro cartoon — a Psychiatrist cartoon, which will be incomprehensible to anyone who’s not up on American punk music, with a bare-chested, long-haired patient being asked by the therapist, “Can you tell me. Iggy, why you want to be a dog?”, a question that makes no sense unless you’re up on the lyrics of particular punk-rock songs; Wayno’s title for the cartoon is “Bark Therapy”, which is entertaining but not actually informative:
(#1) You really have to know about Iggy Pop (pictured on the couch) and his 1969 recording of “I Wanna Be Your Dog” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page)
Iggy Pop has put in a brief appearance on this blog — in my 1/24/16 posting “Morning name: John Varvatos”, in a section on the proto-punk band Iggy and the Stooges (with a reference to “I Wanna Be Your Dog”), But now it’s time to say more.
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Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Pop culture, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
February 27, 2025
It’s penultimate February. Tomorrow, tigers pounce, to devour the month. And then on Saturday, the hordes of rabbits (bearing leeks and daffodils for St. Dafydd’s Day, purely as ornaments, since both are toxic to rabbits) that have been massing at the month’s borders will stream in and overwhelm us all. Sandra Boynton has a cartoon for Rabbit Days (of course she does, bunnies are adorable, and SB is an artist of the adorable), which she last posted on Facebook on 1/31, just before the last onslaught:
Boynton writes: The new month approaches, so I am once again sharing the highly scientific fact that if you say RABBIT RABBIT! as your very first words of the month, they will bring good luck all month long. Additional irrefutable fact is that in worrisome times, the more rabbits mentioned the better.
Sing out, Louise! Now is the time to loudly chant RABBIT RABBIT RABBIT — Marche is icumen in / Lhude sing rabette — as a mantra of protection, a prayer for salvation:
From the fury of the Muskmen free us, O ye rabbits!
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Posted in Language and animals, Language and food, Language and plants, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Quotations | 6 Comments »
February 7, 2025
A Sandra Boynton turkey cartoon from 1980, showing a (polite) offer framed as a request in the form of a question, using the formula May I VP?:
(#1) The exchange — with the offer made by a turkey who appears to be an attendant at a women’s checkroom (see the window in the background, with women’s dresses on hangers in the room behind the window) — follows the polite service script (involving an attendant and a customer, female in this case) in the first two panels, then runs off the rails in the third panel, where an ambiguity in the verb take rears up; the turkey assumes ownership of the coat and walks off with it as their own, leaving a nonplussed coatless customer
Three things here: the turkeys (who are a long-standing thing for Sandra Boynton); the polite service script (which incorporates conventionalized versions of some very indirect speech acts); and the ambiguity of take (which provides a surprise shift from the sense appropriate to the service script to an outrageous and dumbfounding larcenous sense).
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Posted in Allusion, Books, Cartoonists, Jokes, Language and animals, Language play, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Politeness, Pragmatics, Semantics, Social interactions, Speech acts | 1 Comment »
