Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category

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The cartoon glory that was Rome

September 4, 2024

In this morning’s comics feed, two linguistic jokes from the Roman Empire (in a Rhymes With Orange and a Bizarro); maybe it’s just something in the air, but on the other hand, September 4th, 476, marks the end of the Western Roman Empire as a political entity and consequently (in some people’s view) the beginning of the Middle Ages. So let’s say goodbye to the boy emperor Romulus, aka Augustulus, and antiquity; and hello to the barbarians and, oh yes, medieval times!

Bye-bye, Imperial times
Took Romulus to the border, to see the Empire die

I’ll get to Augustulus in a while.  But first the cartoons.

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Posted in Gesture, History, Holidays, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Opposition, Plays, Puns, Semantics, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Acting normal

September 2, 2024

Today’s Zippy asks the question: would it be better if Zippy acted in a normal fashion? Would that make Zerbina happier?


(#1) Faced with a normal-brain alternative to Zippy’s surreal non sequiturs about logic, word salad, and accountants, Zerbina decides to sing along with Rogers and Hart: don’t change a hair for me

A few words about Rogers and Hart’s song, and a few words about me and my postings, which, like my linguistics articles, are regularly labeled as eccentric and idiosyncratic, usually not in a nice way.

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Music, This blogging life | 1 Comment »

Formulaic happiness

September 2, 2024

In today’s Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange, the clams are tenting tonight on the old campground, but find today’s experience to be unaccountably joyless; for some reason, the formulas just aren’t working:


To understand this cartoon, you need to recognize two similarity-based formulaic expressions of English: the metaphor happy camper and the simile happy as a clam; yet neither is overt in the cartoon, though both are alluded to indirectly (we’re campers and we’re clams)

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Posted in Figures of speech, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Simile, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Robotic dim sum

August 31, 2024

🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate August, the Roman Emperor’s last day in office, and (by some reckonings) summer’s end, as the tigers are about to be pushed off the scene by autumnally school-going rabbits, in the great cycle of life

Into this seasonal Sturm und Drang sweeps today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro (Wayno’s title: “The appetizer that’s fried in [the motor oil] 10W-40”), in which we witness the cheering of robots presented with a platter of the coiled metallic snacks they are so fond of:


(#1) The UN Pun Convention of 1962 requires that you groan here (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

Yes, spring ‘a resilient device, typically a helical metal coil, that can be pressed or pulled but returns to its former shape when released, used chiefly to exert constant tension or absorb movement’ (NOAD), here punning on the spring of spring roll ‘an Asian snack consisting of rice paper filled with minced vegetables and usually meat, rolled into a cylinder and fried’ (NOAD again) — and that spring is in fact the name of the season between winter and summer (just in case you were imagining that spring rolls were so called because they leap, or spring, into your mouth, or because they were historically made along small streams, or springs).

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Posted in Ambiguity, Furnishings and tools, Holidays, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | Leave a Comment »

The cob-canine corn dog

August 25, 2024

Steven Levine on Facebook on 8/23, reporting in from an enormously crowded Minnesota State Fair, posted this cartoon t-shirt from the fair, with a note of distress:


(#1) SL: I find this t-shirt design to be disturbing. Shades of Charlie the Tuna.

(To which I added: Eat me!) I’ll get to Charlie the vorarephilic horse mackerel (and the Ameglian Major Cow, too) in a little while. But first, on fun-food corn dogs and cob-canine corn dogs.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Clothing, Compounds, Language and animals, Language and food, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Semantics of compounds | Leave a Comment »

The NASCAR snail races

August 20, 2024

That is, the NASCARGOT races, as a Bizarro of 12/26/10 has it, reveling in the portmanteau of NASCAR and escargot (French ‘snail’) and showing us Dan Piraro’s goofy conception of snails in a NASCAR race:


(#1) The cartoon appeared as the middle panel of a Bizarro Sunday Punnies strip with three bits of word play in it, posted about (without further analysis) in my 12/26/10 posting “Punnies #11” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)

Hat tip to Susan Fischer for dredging up this old cartoon on Facebook yesterday. Causing me to reflect on the fact that not all of my readers will be familiar with the American popcultural phenomenon that is NASCAR; there are people who wouldn’t be surprised to see that contestants in a race carry numbers, but would be baffled by all those ads on the snails’ shells. Indeed, DP has managed to transport the physical trappings of NASCAR vehicles to le monde des escargots. Motor sport meets malacology.

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Posted in French, Language and animals, Language and sports, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Logos, Portmanteaus | 3 Comments »

One Right Way

August 18, 2024

Another brief posting opening up a parallel, from the world of grammar, style, and usage, to yesterday’s posting “Accepting variation, or not”, about the (attempted) enforcement of normative prescriptions for other sorts of behavior. The two crucial panels of a Peanuts comic strip from yesterday’s posting:


(#1) Lucy relays to Linus their grandmother’s disapproval of his security blanket; Linus defies her admirably with a sarcastic defense of variation in behavior

Gramma’s disapproval is implicitly two-pronged. Prong 1 is that having a security blanket is, variously:

different, atypical, unusual, ill-adjusted, nonconforming

while Prong 2, unspoken, is that it is also

undesirable, reprehensible, even contemptible, potentially threatening

Gramma refuses to accept the behavioral variation that Linus displays, thus mirroring the lack of social acceptance of other kinds of variation — in particular, the disapproval, by many, of same-sex desires, practices, and identities; and the more specific disapproval of what I’ve called f-gay men — the effeminate and the faggy. Disapprovals that are especially wounding because Prong 2 is wrapped up in them.

Now to something that might at first glance might seem to be completely different, but also involves a judgment of disapproval — nonacceptance — on a different sort of failure to conform to normative prescriptions, coupled with what amounts to a companion moral judgment on the whole business, including the people involved in it.

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Posted in Language and society, Linguistics in the comics, Social life, Variation | Leave a Comment »

Accepting variation, or not

August 17, 2024

A brief posting designed to work my way towards further postings about recent exchanges with Richard Vytniorgu, on the occasion of his new book (released on 6/21):

RV, Effeminate Belonging: Gender Nonconforming Experience and Gay Bottom Identities, Emerald Publishing, 2024

My plans for posting about RV’s book spun off so many aspects of the work that I have been unable to organize this material into a coherent posting (while still getting through daily life, which has often been challenging in recent months), so I’ve temporized by posting little, more manageable essays on other, unrelated, topics. But I really have to get to some of the Effeminate Belonging material.

Today’s wedge into one bit of this material comes from a Peanuts comic strip, one that first appeared on 8/4/69 (posted recently on Facebook by Jeff Bowles);


Lucy relays to Linus their grandmother’s disapproval of his security blanket

Gramma’s disapproval is implicitly two-pronged. Prong 1 is that having a security blanket is, variously:

different, atypical, unusual, ill-adjusted, nonconforming

while Prong 2, unspoken, is that it is also

undesirable, reprehensible, even contemptible, potentially threatening

(more…)

Posted in Books, Effeminacy, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Linguistics in the comics | 2 Comments »

Said the hip flask to the lab flask

August 14, 2024

Today’s Wayno /Piraro Bizarro:


A flasky put-down pun, from the hip flask to the lab flask (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

First, the pun: in the adjective hip ‘following the latest fashion, especially in popular music and clothes’ (NOAD), punning on the bodypart noun hip in hip flask. Now, all the lexical flask stuff.

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Posted in Furnishings and tools, Insults, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Giving two figs, for science

August 14, 2024

A delightful science-nerd cartoon manifested in several versions being passed around on the net. In my favorite, we’re given a science-illustrator’s b&w drawing of two (edible) figs in cross-section, labeled “fig 1.” and “fig 2.”:


(#1)  The labels we expect are abbreviations for “figure 1.” and “figure 2.”: “fig. 1.” and “fig. 2.”. Instead, we get labels for two figs. Note that the drawings are illustrative figures and also of two figs — so the labels are a subtle graphic pun (“fig” punning on “fig.”)

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Posted in Abbreviation, Art, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | 2 Comments »

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