The Rhymes With Orange from a few days ago:
Hilary Price is fond of POPs (phrasal overlap portmanteaus), and here’s another: distracted driving + driving a hard bargain. The customer is distracted from his bargaining by messages on his cellphone.
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
POP goes the bargain
April 12, 2016The Ascent of MowerMan
April 10, 2016Today’s Zits, with an instance of the Ascent (and Descent) of Man cartoon meme:
Many earlier postings on the meme, and now I’ve created a Page on this blog, on “Evolution postings”, under “Linguistics notes”: postings on the origin and evolution of life, on the origin and evolution of human beings, and on the origin and evolution of human language, plus some related matters.
Zip-O-Rama
April 9, 2016Today’s Zippy takes us to Billy’s Burg-O-Rama in Oxford MA.
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The strip is “about” politics (insofar as a Zippy is “about” anything), but this posting is about the libfix -((o/a)r)ama ‘display, spectacle, something really major’. And about food, starting with burgers (and clams and fish & chips).
Tastee days
April 7, 2016Today’s Zippy:
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From the annals of snowclones, commercial icons in contestation, commercial names, and advertising run amok.
Cucumber soap
April 6, 2016Today’s One Big Happy (from a bit earlier), in which Ruthie copes with the N + N compound cucumber soap, meant as a source compound (soap with cucumbers, or their scent, as the principal or most significant ingredient in it), while Ruthie takes it to be a use compound (soap used for (cleaning) cucumbers):
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Ain’t it the truth?
April 5, 2016In today’s feed, this One Big Happy from 3/7:
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The linguistic point: Ruthie’s mother’s “Ain’t it the truth?” — ain’t in the speech of someone who almost surely isn’t otherwise a user of this word. Instead, she’s playfully quoting a very widespread non-standardism, much as if she’d said “C’est vrai!” or “Veritable!”, in French, in the middle of an English conversation, conveying the equivalent of informal “That’s for sure!” or “You said it!”
The McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs (2002) has an entry for “Ain’t it the truth” as a conventionalized expression, both in non-standard varieties and as an importation into informal standard speech:
Rur. or Jocular That is true.; Isn’t that true? (Used to agree with a statement someone has made.) Jane: I swear, life can be a trial sometimes. Bill: Yes, Lordy. Ain’t it the truth?
From the groaner annals
April 4, 2016The cover of the New Yorker for 4/4/16:
Getting ball park franks on board the plane. Cover by Jaime Hernandez, with the title (groan) “Bun Voyage” (bun – bon).
elefonts
April 2, 2016Monter sur un éléfont, c’est haut, c’est haut!
From a friend on Facebook, this 2/10/12 Wrong Hands cartoon by John Atkinson (thanks to Google Images for finding me the source):
Lots and lots of language play here: the hell in Helvetica, serif / sheriff, the goth kid in Gothic, plus of course, Roman, Swiss, courier, comic, dingbat.
Conversation
April 2, 2016The One Big Hig Happy that came to me today (though it’s dated 3/5):
Ruthe has learned than in free conversation, you’re allowed to bring up all sorts of things you have on your mind, but what she does here is what lots of stand-up comics do, veering from one quirky observation to another. This is monologue, not conversation. She seems not to have learned — or, more likely, she has chosen to disregard — that conversation is participatory, involving attention to the other participants: there is turn-taking, local coherence, and all that good stuff.
Rita M. Weep
April 1, 2016A One Big Happy that appeared in my feed yesterday, though it’s dated 3/2:
I’m enormously fond of Ruthie’s attempts to find meaning in expressions that were unfamiliar to her when she first (mis)heard them, as here. She’d heard “read ’em and weep” used at a triumphant moment in playing poker, and clearly interpreted the beginning as the name Rita, but she isn’t entirely sure what the rest was, though she makes a try at M. Weep. (I think Rita M. Weep would be a fine character to weave a fantasy around. Maybe she’s the famous “lovely Rita, meter maid”.)
I note that the kids have picked up a good bit of poker talk. Trip jacks for “three jacks” is especially nice.