Yesterday’s One Big Happy, with Ruthie coping with figurative language hidden in everyday expressions:
Here it’s facelift, with its image of treating sagging facial tissue by surgically lifting it up. But how is Ruthie to know that? Especially since facelift has been extended to related surgical procedures.
Today’s Zippy, with Mr. (the) Toad (that icon of selfishness) parodying a jazz standard for modern times:
Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm, with language play in honor of the Olympics:
V-PRP + N can be understood in several ways, sometimes subtly different, but potentially distinguished by accent pattern and often associated with ambiguities in the V. As with the opening ceremony here, with (roughly) the Olympic Interpretation ‘ceremony in which an event opens, that is, begins’ (with primary accent on ceremony) vs. the Can Interpretation ‘ceremony in which the top of something is removed to get at its contents’ (with primary accent on opening).
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Two recent cartoons turning on fixed expressions, compounds in fact: a Rhymes With Orange and a One Big Happy:
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A recent Calvin and Hobbes re-run:
The general principle is that whoever discovers (or invents or even just promulgates) something has naming rights, and there are a number of circumstances in which these rights are recognized, though in some — the binomial nomenclature of biology, for instance — there are official bodies that oversee the naming.
It turns out that it’s not very common for someone to name a place, concrete object, idea, product, whatever after themselves, as Calvin and Hobbes both do in the cartoon; descriptive names are much more common, and even in the world of eponymy, naming in honor of someone or something is much more common than naming for oneself . In addition, when something is named after someone, the naming is often done by someone other than the originator.
Prompted by a Zippy posting of mine, Dan Everett posted on Facebook that he had a signed copy from Bill Griffith of a Zippy that was, in some sense, about him (though he’s not actually mentioned in the strip), “Supreme Throwdown” from 1/9/09:
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The allusions by the space-alienoid character (Happy Boy) are to Everett’s work on the Amazonian language Pirahã, its speakers, and their culture — work that drew Everett into confrontation with Noam Chomsky, who’s figured in Zippy strips at least six times, from 1993 through 2015.
(It starts in a candy store and eventually works back to my grade school years.)
A recent One Big Happy has Ruthie trying to buy some candy:
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Well, it’s called penny candy, but that’s just its name, not a description. You can’t take the name literally.
