The One Big Happy from 12/9, in which Ruthie is rotfl over the name of a card game:
Exactly my response when, at the age of 7 or 8, I first heard the name of this card game. I mean, pea-knuckle!
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
pinochle
January 5, 2019Private conlangs in the comics
January 5, 2019Yesterday’s Sally Forth (by Jim Keefe):
Ted and Sally are recalling an absurd private language they constructed for themselves to talk about nearby people in public — a language that only they would know. Their Monkeyish was absurd because, with only 12 words (7 of them prepositions!), there was clearly almost nothing that they could say.
Nighthawks on New Year’s
January 2, 2019A memorable New Yorker cover for the New Year: an Owen Smith parody of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (one of a great many such parodies):
(#1)
Three things: Nighthawks parodies, Owen Smith, and party hats.
Annals of indirection
January 1, 2019Chip Dunham’s Overboard strip from December 28th:
(#1) Captain Crow and his dog Louie
An exercise in both syntax/semantics and semantics/pragmatics: on syntactic constructions and their semantics, and on the indirect conveying of meaning in context.
Above, what will become example (c) in the syntactic discussion:
(c) I don’t think I’ve told you today what a wonderful dog you are
which will lead to a related example, Sir Van Morrison’s song line in (d):
(d) Have I told you lately that I love you?
Ruthie x 3
December 29, 2018In my comics feed for One Big Happy: The Huskies play Oregon (11/23), Money is the root of boll weevil (11/28), ABC order (11/30):
Nighthawks in search of an artist
December 29, 2018Passed on on Facebook, this Bill Whitehead cartoon, with some broad art humor:
Before Edward Hopper discovered the sad diner and immortalized it in Nighthawks.
bait and tackle
December 27, 2018A coordination of two nouns, conventionally paired in bait & tackle shop, referring to a store that provides supplies for sport fishermen. Like this place in Benicia CA:
(#1)
And elaborately played on in the Bizarro from December 23rd:
The family of Word Inclusion snowclones
December 27, 2018Keep X In AXB, Put X (Back) In(to) AXB, Take X Out of AXB
(where X is a word included in a larger word AXB — included in pronunciation (exactly or approximately) or spelling or both)
I’ll start with one of the most complicated examples, the seasonally apropos slogan with KEEP:
(#1) An outdoor vinyl banner from ChurchSupplier.com
then go on to a seasonal example with TAKE, and end with the great mass of examples, with PUT.
Penguin Claus
December 27, 2018A bold proposal in Slate magazine on 12/10/13 by Aisha Harris, “Santa Claus Should Not Be a White Man Anymore: It’s time to give St. Nick his long overdue makeover”. No, she’s not proposing that Santa should be a black man; she’s saying Santa should be a black and white … penguin.
(#1) Mark Alan Stamaty’s vision of Penguin Claus
Diminished with age
December 27, 2018A Mike Shiells cartoon, passed on on Facebook by Karen Chung, for its entertainment value as a burst of puns:
But what caught my eye in this cartoon of a pencil funeral was the fact that the deceased had been so diminished with age, worn down to a nub by use. I’m being worn down myself. For decades, I was 5′10″, but in recent years I’ve lost over 3 inches in height, a tangible decline: I can no longer reach things on top shelves, in stores and in my own home. I was prepared for some of the physical ravages of age, but nobody told me about this one.