Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category

Let’s just call it “grammar”

July 20, 2016

Yesterday’s Rhymes With Orange:

A visit to a theme park with a linguistic theme: it deals, at least, in onomatopoeia (rattle for the sound a rattlesnake’s tail makes), palindromes (expressions that read the same forwards and backwards, like the names Anna and Otto), and portmanteaus (like palindomedary, palindrome + dromedary) and their visual equivalents, like the palindromedary in the cartoon, a nice counterpart to Anna and Otto.

What to call a place that displayed such things — and anagrams and chiasmus and puns and limericks and knock-knock jokes and sports chants and ritualized insults and auctioneers’ patter and damning with faint praise and Cockney rhyming slang and all sorts of culture-specific phenomena that are manifested in a language (in this case, all are manifested in  English) but are not part of the system of that language, the way, say, Subject-Auxiliary Inversion is part of the system of English. Instead, they are things you can do with, or in, the language.

But we have no good word (or other fixed expression) for this rich assortment of language uses and rouitines, so (as in other cases) the poor overworked word grammar is pressed into service. And the theme park is called Grammar Land.

Zippy on a cross-comic run

July 16, 2016

In the “Ask the Archivist” column on the Comics Kingdom Blog (from King Features) on the 14th:

It’s been thirty years since Bill Griffith’s underground comix star Zippy The Pinhead went above ground and joined King Features Syndicate. Zippy had been around since 1971, so he’s in the midst of a forty-fifth anniversary, too.

Zippy, as you might know, was inspired by Griffith’s real-life interaction with a Pinhead, as well as Pinheads in popular culture, like the co-stars of the infamous film, “FREAKS” (MGM 1932).

But Griffith has always been more interested in the way culture has impressed him, especially that which addressed kids many years ago. At any time, incomprehensibly, long-dead actors or forgotten corporate mascots might appear, and interact with Zippy or Griffith’s cartoon alter ego. It’s like a surreal dream, often punctuated with misty bits of philosophy and out-of-date advertising catchphrases.

Today I’ve picked some of the Zipster’s various encounters with comic characters

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Garden moments

July 15, 2016

Today’s Calvin and Hobbes in my comics feed:

(#1)

In the land of sentient plants.

Meanwhile, I’ve been laboring on getting my little container garden in hand, after a decade of devastation, neglect, and drought. Into the land of vegetative reproduction (cymbidiums,geraniums / pelargoniums, coleus / plecranthus) and nurturing some gift plants (two succulent gardens, kalanchoe, penstemon, and hydrangea).

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goose bumps

July 14, 2016

The One Big Happy in my cartoon feed today has Ruthie once again coping with an expression that doesn’t make much sense to her: goose bumps:

At some point, she’d heard the expression (a N + N compound), understood that it came in two parts, and that as a whole it referred o a physical manifestation of fright (and perhaps other states of mind) — but failed to grasp the identities of the two parts and so remembered them incorrectly. In the simplest of terms, there are two ways to misidentify a lexical item: on the basis of phonology or on the basis of semantics; such perception + storage errors are the counterparts to two familiar types of production errors (phonological, aiming at presentation but producing preposition; semantic, aiming at research (assistant) but producing teaching).

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Wolverine eats a weenie

July 14, 2016

From the queerty site on the 11th, “37 Unintentionally Gay Moments in Comic Book History”, this Fleer trading card from 1995 (in a series of X-Men trading cards from the period):

Wolverine is here using his three retractable claws as skewers for grilling a frankfurter for eating as food, but (if you’re inclined to seeing such things) the drawing is also open to the interpretation that rather than literally eating a weenie ‘hot dog’, Wolverine is metaphorically eating (that is, fellating) a weenie ‘penis’.

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Kadir Nelson

July 13, 2016

The cover of the most recent New Yorker, “A Day at the Beach” by Kadir Nelson:

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Françoise Mouly’s “cover story” from the 4th (in its entirety):

“I grew up close to the shore, and I have always loved spending time at the beach,” the Los Angeles-based artist Kadir Nelson says of his cover for this week’s issue. “When I was young it meant time with my dad, and now that I’m a father myself I relish the long summer days spent with my own children.”

Mouly and Nelson together are deliberately framing the painting as just another depiction of Americans enjoying summer pleasures, of the sort the magazine has done many dozens of over the years. And so it is. But of course it shows a black (or, as Nelson himself would prefer, Black) man and his children enjoying the beach — and in this season of Black Lives Matter, it’s a powerful assertion of the humanity of Black people. In this context, Nelson’s cover is a political statement, entirely in line with the bulk of his work, which affirms the dignity of Black people and celebrates their heroisms.

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Word play for 7-11

July 11, 2016

Three cartoons today (July 7th, or 7/11 in American usage; this will be important): a perfect pun (from Rhymes With Orange), using an ambiguity in local; a more distant pun (from Mother Goose and Grimm), linguistically and visually combining Bonnie and Clyde with Blondie ad Dagwood; and a Scott Hilburn (from The Argyle Sweater today) using the 50th anniversary of the Slurpee to float an almost-perfect pun
perches / purchase
(/z/ vs. /s/).

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goober

July 10, 2016

Today’s Bizarro, with a terrible pun (and a large number of Dan Piraro’s symbols):

  (#1)

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Two cat cartoons

July 9, 2016

Not quite what you think. Two cartoons: a Mother Goose and Grimm from yesterday, today’s Bizarro:

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(#2)

To appreciate #1, you need to know about the custom of putting out a cat for the night (V + Prt put out ‘put sth. outside (a house)’), and you need to recognize the piece of heavy earth-moving equipment in the room, with brand names Caterpilllar and (clipped) Cat.

To appreciate #2, you need to know that Zeus / Jupiter is the mythological hurler of thunderbolts, and you need to recognize Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat (with one of his accompanying Things) and to see that the figure in the cartoon is a hybrid of Zeus and Dr. Seuss’s Cat, a combination conveyed by the portmanteau name Dr. Zeuss.

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Someone old, someone new

July 8, 2016

Two cartoons from the latest (July 11/18) New Yorker, by veteran artist Danny Shanahan (in the magazine since 1988) and newcomer Edward Steed (first appeared there in 2013):

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(#2)

The Shanahan (which is, in a sense, “about” animal communication) exemplifies the cartoon meme of the animal in a bar (most often a dog, but many other animals have engaged in bar conversations); in this case, the animal in a bar is combined with a comic trope in which a bartender covers for a patron by telling a caller to the bar (clasically, the patron’s wife) that the patron isn’t there. The Steed is a bizarre bulletin in the news for penises.

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