More from the cartoonist of the bookish class, passed on by Facebook friends: on translation, and on book formats.
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
Two bookish Tom Gaulds
September 20, 2018Bridge Over the River Kawaii
September 19, 2018
The cartoon milkman
September 11, 2018… and a bad grandpa pun, in the One Big Happy from 8/14:
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(The characters, left to right in the first and last panels: the neighbor boy James; the son of the OBH family, Ruthie’s older brother Joe; and Joe’s grandfather.)
Grandpa reproduces a bit of culture lore, about liaisons between housewives and milkmen. The boys are no doubt somewhat vague about what would be involved in a woman’s running off with the milkman. But, more pressingly, they don’t know what a milkman is: the N + N compound is scarcely transparent semantically, so unless you’ve actually had milkmen in your experience, tales of women and milkmen are just baffling.
I gotta go
September 11, 2018The catch phrase of writer and performer Merle Kessler’s alter ego Ian Shoales, just a bit short of the more vernacular I’m outta here. That’s motion go. Then there’s elimination go, and an ambiguity between the two, as exploited by Calvin in this (recently re-cycled) Calvin and Hobbes strip:
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Three bulletins
September 6, 2018From the annals of naming, a probably inevitable name for a wine blend. From the cartoon files, a recent SMBC with a classic grammar peeve that is newly relevant. And from the news for penises, the image of a bicycle turned into a penis.
Brush away the blue-tailed skink
September 4, 2018From Chris Zable on Facebook on August 3rd, a photo from her family’s holiday in Florida, with her comment:
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“Spotted this little lizard with a bright blue tail on a fence rail at the Tallahassee Museum. Much of their space is a zoo of local native species in generously-sized enclosures that are just fenced off bits of native habitat. We saw pumas, red wolves, and foxes among other critters.”
As good a photo of a blue-tailed skink as any you can find on the net. To come: on skinks; on the “Blue Tail Fly” song; and on my gay highjacking of the song, as “Blue Tailed Skink” (with skink as a portmanteau, skank + twink) — taking things far from Chris’s original child-friendly travel report.
Uneasily cute
September 2, 2018Today’s Zippy, on cute vs. horrifying, two territories sometimes separated by a chasm, more often by an uneasy borderland:
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The central figure is either a cartoon character or a roadside fiberglass figure, but either way I haven’t found the original. Suggestions welcomed.
Elsewhere in Zippyland, there’s a domain of fun and dreams fulfilled, coexisting uneasily with, next to, a land of terror and nightmare — in amusement parks.
Outside of the darkly cute areas of Zippyland, there’s a huge sweetly cute world, centered on Japan and South Korea, but with a soft pink haze of Hello Kitty, Pinkfong (Baby Shark!), and more blanketing much of the world.
Ruthie reanalyzes, and so do lots of others
September 2, 2018The 8/5 One Big Happy has Ruthie doing her best to make sense of the idiom the spitting image (of) as, roughly, ‘the person someone looks like when they spit’.
Behind this lies a whole chain of reanalyses, none of them due to Ruthie. Ultimately, sex is probably involved. (Oh, isn’t that always the way?)
Subscendence by sugar bomb
September 1, 2018Today’s Calvin and Hobbes re-run is yet another episode of breakfast cereal as mind-altering drug:
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Cartoon understanding: more Leigh Rubin
September 1, 2018Today’s Rubin, which works or not depending on whether you get the cultural reference:
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The title for the cartoon isn’t crucial to understanding. Nor is the exact year 1972. But chart topper and the ID badge without a name on it are essential ingredients.