First, season’s greetings from the person responsible for “Hippo Birdie Two Ewe(s)!”. Then, a duplicitous stop-motion animation penguin bearing gifts.
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
For the season: from fish to moose, penguin intervention
December 22, 2018Sports commentary
December 20, 2018Thanks to Facebook friends who provided a link to an xkcd cartoon from way back (5/27/11): #904 Sports:
The point is that sports color commenators treat essentially random day-to-day fluctuations as indicators of trends — because they have lots of time to fill and not a lot of substance to fill it with (play-by-play coverage is something else), and because like all of us they are narratophiles (lovers of story) and seek to find a coherent narrative in pretty much anything that happens. Meanwhile, color commentators can fall back on all that accumulated data, to wield fan statistics as another time-filler.
A snappish portion of the class
December 19, 2018The One Big Happy of 11/20, in which, as usual, Ruthie copes with an unfamiliar (semi-)technical term (here, cross section) by extracting a familiar word (here, the cross of irritability) from it:
Ruthie crosses the cross ‘representative’ of cross section with the cross ‘snappish, angry’ of cross words. These are grossly different lexical items in modern English, but in fact they share an etymology that goes back to the noun cross of the hymns “The Old Rugged Cross” and “In the Cross of Christ I Glory”.
Mid-December celebrations
December 16, 2018Sandra Boynton announces a holiday you might have missed:
You might choose to dip Ludwig van in chocolate today; it’s his birthday. Better, celebrate my excellent friend Ned Deily; everyone is better with chocolate on them, and it’s his birthday too.
Appearances
December 14, 2018Two recent items about men trying to look attractive (to other men): on the Kitsch Bitsch Facebook page today, 1950s physique model Mel Fortune festooned for Christmas (the image is entertaining but just barely not X-rated, so if such images trouble you, leave this posting); and a William Haefeli cartoon from the latest (12/17/18) New Yorker, featuring a pair of his upscale urban gay men negotiating a date / trick.
Song of the season
December 12, 2018It’s time for that moving, rousing carol that makes this time of the year so special. I refer of course to the great seasonal song of Okefenokee County, the Pogolicious, Kellytastic “Deck us all with Boston Charlie”:
Cartoon cereals
December 12, 2018In today’s Zits, Jeremy enjoys the Swiss Army knife, the Dagwood sandwich, of breakfast cereals:
No need to choose; it’s got everything you might want, all in one package.
The king of breakfast-cereal comic strips is, of course, Calvin and Hobbes. See my 9/1/18: posting “Subscendence by sugar bomb”, with 4 strips on Calvin and sugary cereals.
Understanding Bizarro
December 10, 2018Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, requiring a crucial piece of cultural knowledge:
(#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 figure of Batman is the easy part of understanding this cartoon; asking the waiter for “the insect steward” is the part that draws heavily on background knowledge: that bats primarily eat insects, and that high-end restaurants will offer the services of a sommelier, or wine steward, to its diners. So we are asked to see Batman simultaneously as an upper-class man (Bruce Wayne) ordering food in an elegant restaurant (admittedly, in a bat costume) and as an actual bat, a predator seeking its prey.
Grass-fed beef
December 10, 2018Annals of hypallage, food-source division. In a 1/30/17 New Yorker cartoon by P.C. Vey:
Contemplating the nightmare that bedevils animal rights activists: force-feeding creatures to prepare them for human consumption.