Earlier today, a goofy Zippy in which styrofoam packing peanuts figured prominently. I was horrified by the idea that Zippy might have discovered a way to cultivate them in his garden so that they, omigod, multiplied. That reminded Benita Bendon Campbell of an excellent Breaking Cat News in which cats and people find themselves at cross purposes on the question of packing peanuts.
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
On the question of packing peanuts
May 22, 2016A slow meme
May 22, 2016Today’s Rhymes With Orange plays on the proverbial slowness of snails:
(#1)
Slow snails are such a recurrent theme in cartoons that they can be seen to constitute a cartoon meme.
Old fashioned Super Duck
May 20, 2016Today’s Zippy brings modern comics fans back to 1955 and good old-fashioned Super Duck:
(#1)
The contrast here is between the conventions and content of American comics in their classic period and those of more recent years, where innovative formats, topics. and narrative organizations are common.
Griffy (from a seat at his telescope in the Griffith Observatory in L.A.) tosses Super Duck at the superhero fanboys, to astound them with the conventions of the classic days.
Bonus later: if Super Duck, why not Super Dick? Why not, indeed — in any number of senses.
Comic-stripped!
May 20, 2016Unearthed in my giant pile of books, Arthur Asa Berger’s The Comic-Stripped American: What Dick Tracy, Blondie, Daddy Warbucks, and Charlie Brown Tell us about Ourselves (1973), an early piece of cultural criticism based on the comics:
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(That’s Mutt and Jeff on the cover.)
Berger on p. 1:
this is the first book I know of which deals with the way comics reflect our [American] culture.
If not actually the first, certainly a pioneering book.
The White Palace Cafe
May 19, 2016Today’s Zippy takes us to a commercial street scene:
(#1)
This posting is about the cafe and its context. In the spirit of earlier Zippy diner, cafe, and motel postings.
Definitions
May 19, 2016A second cartoon today, a Bizarro on categorization and labeling:
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
Questions of categorization and labeling come up again and again on this blog: among other places, in incessant discussions of what counts as Art, or a particular genre of art, and what counts as Music, or a particular genre of music. We’re talking about cultural artifacts here, so there’s no appealing to natural kinds here; there’s variation (across groups of people), changes over time, typically uncertain boundaries, and often syncretic forms, cmbining features from different genres.
How long?
May 19, 2016(The echo in the title is of the shapenote hymn traditionally sung to the tune NORTHFIELD, words by Isaac Watts, with the first line,”How long, dear Savior, O how long”. More on the hymn below; here it’s enough to point out that the hymn is not really relevant to the cartoon in this posting, beyond the fact that its first line begins with an instance of degree how (which figures significantly in the cartoon).
The One Big Happy cartoon for today, featuring Ruthie and her brother Joe:
The subordinate clause is two-ways ambiguous, with two constituent structures and, in synch with these, two different adverbs how. For (1) how long babies:
(1a) [ how long ] + [ babies ] (with degree how)
VERSUS
(1b) [ how ] + [ long babies ] (with manner how)
Structural ambiguity (ambiguity in phrase structure aka constituent structure) without lexical ambiguity, and lexical ambiguity (ambiguity as to the lexical items involved in an example — specifically, different items how) without structural ambiguity are, of course, both well attested, but here they occur together.
Pebbles
May 17, 2016Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm, with neither Mother Goose nor any of her animals in it:
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To understand this strip, you have to know about the varieties of Pebbles breakfast cereals — one of which is Fruity Pebbles. (And then, of course, you have to recognize fruit as an anti-gay slur and recognize the abbreviation LGBT.)
Monday language comics
May 16, 2016Two Monday comics on linguistic topics: a Calvin and Hobbes with an unfortunate ambiguity (pitch the tent), and a Zits with a portmanteau for a combo sport (dodgebowl):
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(#2)
Punch in the presence of the passenjare
May 15, 2016About the British humo(u)r magazine (my cartoon/comics library has two anthologies from the publication; the second has the Ed Fisher cartoons I posted about yesterday) and about its long history (going back to 1841). The magazine was given to plays on the word punch, but so far as I can tell, not involving the quotation in the title of this posting — a 140-year-old meme, but a North American one.
To come: the magazine; uses of the word punch; and “Punch in the presence of the passenjare”.