Today’s Zippy, a Bill Griffith bulletin on the art world:
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Along the way, we get a connection between surrealism and magic realism, Picasso as a cartoonist, and a note on the convention that cartoon characters don’t age.
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
Dark magic
October 21, 2018She called herself Lil’
October 20, 2018In today’s comics feed, the 9/22 One Big Happy, in which Joe wrestles with people named /lɪl/:
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(And then there’s Li’l Abner.)
What room am I in?
October 20, 2018This photoon passed on to me by Karen Chung on Facebook (I have no idea of its ultimate source):
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Context, context, context.
What’s he like?
October 18, 2018In today’s comics feed, the One Big Happy for September 21st:
Playground Lady intends a WH question with (a reduced variant of) the auxiliary V is + a predicative PP headed by the P like ‘similar to’. Ruthie, ever keen on the reading not intended, hears a WH question with (a reduced variant of) the auxiliary V does (a PRS form of the V lexeme DO) + a complement VP headed by the BSE form like of the V lexeme LIKE ‘find enjoyable’. What is he like? (possible answer: He’s short and blond and funny-looking ) vs. What does he like? (possible answer: He likes playing video games).
An ailuropodal moment
October 17, 2018On Facebook, Emily Menon Bendor has passed on this Liz Climo cartoon for the Halloween season, which I posted about here on 4/20/13, in “Liz Climo”:
I now take this occasion to announce the creation of a Page on this blog (dedicated to my two Canadian ailuropod friends, Chris Ambidge and Leith Chu) about my Panda postings. With introductory notes about pandas and about pandapunctuational Lynne Truss.
Piñata under the gun
October 15, 2018(Bonus content: a news bulletin for penises, with two items.)
Today’s Wayno/Piraro combo:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
Simultaneously a boy about to bash a rainbow donkey piñata with a bat — a baseball bat, rather than the usual piñata-specific stick or bat (illustrated below) — and a military officer about to execute a prisoner by firing squad. So both in the everyday world and in a metaphorical world systematically mapped onto the everyday world.
Two word confusion cartoons
October 13, 2018The One Big Happy in today’s feed (from 9/16) and the Zippy for today: Nat the name (short for Nathaniel) vs. gnat the insect, both /næt/; and Superfund (‘ a US federal government program designed to fund the cleanup of toxic wastes’ (NOAD)) vs. superfun (‘great fun’, with the prefix super– ‘great, large’), with /fʌnd/ vs. /fʌn/, but usually leveled to the latter via final t/d-deletion before a word beginning with a consonant (here, before the word site):
Nomenclature as destiny
October 9, 2018A Scott Hilburn cartoon from 4/24/18:
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As they are called, so shall they serve. So says the law.
Fly formulaicity
October 8, 2018… in the 10/3 Wayno/Bizarro collab entitled “Off the wall”:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
A little festival of formulaicity. In the title, the (informal) idiom off the wall and an allusion to the idiom fly on the wall. In the interviewee’s remark, the (colloquial) idiom fly in the buttermilk and perhaps an allusion to the song “Ole Buttermilk Sky” [10/9: but see the comment below on “Skip to My Lou”]; an allusion to a family of “Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup” jokes; and the idiom fly in the ointment. Plus a pair of excellently anthropomorphic houseflies on a tv talkshow; if it’s a late-night show, it could be Fly By Night (with the idiom fly-by-night).
He shot the serif
October 6, 2018Today’s Wayno/Bizarro collab:
(#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 play on the
NO SHOES / NO SHIRT / NO SERVICE
sign in some restaurants. Here enforced by a maître d’ who’s a (serifed) uppercase B. Suitably serifed uppercase diners fill the seats, while a shirted and shod but sans-serif uppercase T realizes he won’t be served.