The One Big Happy from the 5th, with Ruthie, characteristically, misunderstanding an unfamiliar medical term:
Clever of Ruthie’s grandfather to get to radiologist so quickly.
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
Ruthie and the radio doctor
January 7, 2016Bizarro groaner
January 7, 2016Today’s Bizarro, with a major pun:
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
Groan: analogy – an allergy. Fairly distant pun for rhotic (r-ful) speakers like me, potentially perfect pun for non-rhotic (r-less) speakers in connected speech (where the indefinite article an is part of a phonological word with allergy, so that the [n] moves from a coda to an onset; then things depend on the vowels in the –ogy part of analogy and the –ergy part of allergy).
The linguists’ revenge
January 7, 2016A cartoon from the Speculative Grammarian site, passed along on Facebook by John Lawler:
Linguists, wearied of being asked how many languages they speak, now get their revenge.
Bilkpoe (and fractured Stein)
January 7, 2016The Zippy from the 5th, with writer Edgar Allan Poe (under the name Elgar Durwin Poboy) crossed with Army Sgt. Bilko from the tv show The Phil Silvers Show (in a mash-up of high culture and pop culture):
(#1)
After these burlesques of Poe, today we get burlesques of Gertrude Stein:
(#2)
No writer is safe.
The New Year’s resolution
January 6, 2016
The news for penises, issue #1 of 2016
January 5, 2016A continuing series on this blog, with at least 9 postings before this under the heading “The news for penises” (plus a great many other penis postings not under that heading). Four items that have come to me in the past few days: an ad for gay porn with some phonological play in it; horse penises in Kyrgyzstan; beef whistle as a slang term for the penis; and the celebrated candiru fish of the Amazon.
Urinating superheroes
January 4, 2016(Considerable frank talk about men’s bodies and sex between men, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Armed by two recent postings on urinals — January 1st ,”On urinals and the conventions of the men’s room”, and January 2nd, “The news for urinals” — I can reurn to an issue raised in another January 1st posting, “Holiday images”, with a section about a Christmas composition of superhero action figures by Indonesian photographer Edy Hardjo, who distributes photos of his entertaining compositions under the pseudonym Hrjoe. That Hrjoe posting had a quote from a Cultura Inquieta (CI) piece about Hrjoe’s work, describing his compositions and how he creates them. In the CI piece there’s a reference to one of Hrjoe’s works, with five superhero figures lined up against a wall, described in the following way:
Watch as Earth‘s mightiest heroes pee on a wall
(#1)
At the time I doubted that this was quite the right way to think about #1, and now that I’ve written quite a bit about men pissing, I can explain why.
For Sainte Geneviève, who saved Paris from the Huns
January 4, 2016
Two for New Year’s Day
January 1, 2016
Holiday images
January 1, 2016Two odd sets of holiday images: a superhero Xmas greeting, and BDSM images for both Xmas and New Year’s.