Today’s Zippy wanders across a surreal landscape, with at least two items of linguistic interest: the name of the character Premium Cruiseline (with its modifying noun premium) and the form poodle-napping (with the libfix -nap):
These ingredients, in order:
Today’s One Big Happy turns on two interpretations of the same gesture, intended by Avis as an air quote (two fingers on each hand) pointedly framing the word mature as euphemistic, but seen by Ruthie as a threat to tickle her with those same four fingers:
Air quotes I’m long familiar with, but tickle sign (as used here; there is an ASL sign for TICKLE, of course) or tickle gesture I’m not, though they seem clear enough.
Today’s Zippy, with one of his celebrated song burlesques:
Though the parody words are sometimes quite distant from the original, the accordion, the title “Cheese Barrel Polka”, and the meter and rhyme scheme of the song should work together to get you almost immediately to “Beer Barrel Polka”, with the verse
Roll out the barrel, we’ll have a barrel of fun
Roll out the barrel, we’ve got the blues on the run
Zing boom tararrel, ring out a song of good cheer
Now’s the time to roll the barrel, for the gang’s all here
Today’s Calvin and Hobbes (as usual, a re-play of a strip from some time ago):
Ah, the world of high-sugar breakfast cereals marketed to (sweets-loving) kids, visited here a week ago in a posting “Sweet nothings: candy, cereal, advertising”, with a One Big Happy cartoon on candy advertising to kids and a report on an Observer article “Selling Sweet Nothings”, about cereal advertisements to children and to their parents.
I doubt that any cereal company would market a product so blatantly named “Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs” (however appropriate that name might be). Maybe “Chocolate Frosted Fuzzies” (suggesting girlish cuteness) or “Chocolate Frosted Torpedoes” (suggesting boyish aggressiveness).
Passed on by Garson O’Toole on ADS-L, a Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal cartoon from 8/26/11, with a (long and complex) version of Abbott & Costello’s “Who’s on First?” comedy routine that uses the abbreviations for the names of chemical elements in the periodic table (K potassium, Na sodium, No nobelium, etc.): K understood as affirmative ‘kay ‘OK’, Na as negative nah, No as negative no, etc.
Passed on by Horton Copperpot, this day-appropriate Bizarro cartoon from back in 2012 (which I thought I’d posted, but apparently not):
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
St.Patrick famously (but fabulously) drove the snakes from Ireland, thus leaving the snake-haired Medusa bald (as above) and without her powers. Bad history for a blind date.
From my King Features feed today, two cartoons of linguistic interest: a Mother Goose and Grimm with a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) and a Zippy that happens to use a playful verb with, it turns out, a long history:
(#1)
(#2)
Today’s Bizarro, exploiting an ambiguity in pragmatics, use in discourse contexts:
(#1)
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
Your money’s no good here has a use as a pragmatic idiom, conventionally conveying that at this moment it’s of no use in the context because the services or goods it’s being offered for are being supplied for free, are complimentary, are “on the house”. But in the cartoon, the bartender is speaking literally, saying that the customer’s money is no good here because it’s not in fact legal tender.
Today’s Rhymes With Orange:
It’s been a while since we had a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau), but here’s a cute one (Hilary Price is fond of them): prairie dog + dog walker = prairie dog walker, which is what the fellow in the cartoon is — definitely a niche occupation, not much in demand.
Recent e-mail from my old friend Larry Schourup with two very different offerings of interest: a piece about Mayan counterparts to modern comics, and a response to my 2/23/16 posting (on “Who is Silvia?”), which had a Schubert setting of Shakespeare, very alliterative, with a (Kurt) Moll performance of Mozart (from The Marriage of Figaro), also alliterative.