Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
June 18, 2026
Just 3 days ago (6/15), it was the mantric pleasures of my ball: Key lime cheese ball, Key lime cheese ball, Key lime cheese ball. And then today (6/18), the Pinhead citizens of Dingburg have taken to chanting for their remarkable flange: galvanized steel socket flange, galvanized steel socket flange, galvanized steel socket flange.
Respect their flange! onomatomania, onomatomania, onomatomania!
Coming soon: the steel flange cheese ball, a triumph of textural contrast. Rivaling the US capital’s paint chip algae bloom (Symphony In Blue And Green).
Posted in Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »
June 17, 2026
(Significant amounts of sexual crudity, so not for the eyes and ears of kids or the sexually modest)
Niall Maher’s New Yorker daily cartoon for 6/15/26:
(#1) To make any sense of this wonderful cartoon, you need to have detailed knowledge of two different events: from 5/19/1962 (I was just a month away from graduating from Princeton); and from 6/14/2026 (essentially, now), with a glance forward to 7/4 — events celebrating the birthdays of two different US Presidents (John F. Kennedy then, our overlord Grabpussy now), through two different renditions of the song “Happy Birthday”: in 1962, in a potent haze of female sexual desire and sexual desirability (by Marilyn Monroe, in as close to naked as she should get while being in principle fully and elaborately clothed), but in this week’s cartoon, by a muscular machine of male aggression (who doesn’t look at all ready to deliver an adoring serenade to this particular President)
And now: backstory, tons of backstory.
(more…)
Posted in Events and occasions, Gender and sexuality, Language and sports, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Understanding comics, Vaginality | Leave a Comment »
June 16, 2026
(There will be some man-on-man sex, in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest)
From my 6/13 posting “Two laughs-out-loud and a shiver of self-recognition”, about this Sarah Akinterinwa Psychiatrist strip:
The therapist recommends, as a relief from anxiety, the familiar comfort of rewatching the same series until its outcomes feel more knowable than your own: a very common strategy for dealing with the terrible burdens of the daily news — and [a salve for anxiety] I regularly employ
For me, not a joke, but a life strategy.
Emily Menon Bender then wondered what some of my favorites were. Below, with only minor editing, my answer.
(more…)
Posted in Acting, Actors, Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »
June 13, 2026
Cartoons that especially moved me in the latest — 6/1/26 — issue of the New Yorker: two by artists who are old acquaintances on this blog (Drew Dernavich and Frank Cotham), trafficking here in their brands of absurdity (their gags made me laugh out loud); plus one by British cartoonist, illustrator, and writer Sara Akinterinwa (whose work, all recent, explores dating, relationships, identity, politics, and navigating adult life as a young woman of color) that gave me not a great laugh but a shiver of self-recognition: that’s not funny, that’s my life strategy!
(more…)
Posted in Comic conventions, Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Language and medicine, Language and sports, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Race and ethnicity | Leave a Comment »
June 9, 2026
The 6/1 Zippy strip celebrates a vibrant life on the side of the road, in drive-in joints offering comfort food and in flashy highway motels, in the lost days of mid-20th-century America (think HoJo’s clam strips):
(#1) Stunned by signage: an octogenarian’s bulletin from the golden days; the cartoonist Bill Griffith was born in 1944, I was born in 1940, so this was the time of our youth
Remembrance of lost time: L-Ken’s Drive-In Restaurant in Colonie NY (a northern suburb of Albany, the state capital) was demolished on 4/20/17; the Tucson Inn, in Arizona’s second city, was demolished in April 2025. Both were famed for their neon signs (cartooned above).
(more…)
Posted in Architecture, Art, Linguistics in the comics, Signage, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »
June 2, 2026
(not the cartoonist’s fault, but my discussion veers occasionally onto fellatio, in vulgar street language, and that’s out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest)
The Pearls Before Swine strip of 5/31, Stephan Pastis’s farewell to the month of May, devoted to one of his outrageously complex jokes (it’s so off-the-wall intricate that Rat, one of his characters, takes to protesting against it):
Three contributions: (1) the joke genre (the setup / payoff formula pun); (2) the English verb succeed, homophonous with suck seed; and (3) the familiar proverb, popularized by William Edward Hickson in 19th-century England: If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again — all the while skirting (4) the sexual collocation suck seed (with seed ‘semen, cum’), a variant of suck cum
On to the four contributions.
(more…)
Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Rhyme, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
May 31, 2026
Hey, there, server lad,
Have you any wool?
Yes, sir, yes, sir,
One alpaca full!
This Drew Dernavich cartoon in the 6/1/26 issue of the New Yorker:
A wonderfully absurd riff on the custom of restaurant servers offering freshly ground black pepper (occasionally, also freshly ground sea salt) upon the appearance of food at the table, obliging the diners to participate in a pretentious edgy ritual of condiment dispensation
(more…)
Posted in Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Parodies, Poetry, Pop culture | 1 Comment »
May 28, 2026
The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro of 5/26:
A Wayno Psychiatrist cartoon, this time with couples therapy in which the couples’s conflicts are referred to the attitudes of their inner children, one of whom is said to be infected with the dreaded cooties of childlore (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
It’s likely that some of my readers will find this one-sentence summary of the cartoon’s content to be simply incomprehensible — because the two central terms in all of this belong to specialized vocabularies — cooties from American childlore; and inner child from pop-psychological therapy-talk.
(more…)
Posted in Childhood, Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture, Psychology | Leave a Comment »
May 22, 2026
Yesterday, in my posting “Sir, I bring you a token of my subservience”, a Zippy strip in which Griffy addresses a Muffler Man, offering the fiberglass giant a phallic offering to his superior masculinity. It turns out that this strip is a reworking of the text from an earlier strip on a similar theme. And there we have the two-strip set-up for today’s discussion:
(#1) [The 5/21/26] strip “Tired Out”, with, oh dear, the alpha male theme made explicit; it is, in any case, all about (hyper)masculinity vs. inferior masculinity
(#2) The 6/2/17 strip “Rubber Fire”, showing (hyper)masculine contempt for analytic academics (I am, of course, the very model of the modern analytic academic, so eat my shorts, brute boy)
(more…)
Posted in Address terms, Art, Books, Count & Mass, Insults, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Phallicity, Pop culture, Pragmatics, Signs and symbols, Vaginality | Leave a Comment »
May 21, 2026
The crucial moment of today’s (5/21) Zippy strip, in which Griffy addresses a Muffler Man, offering the fiberglass giant a phallic offering to his superior masculinity. It’s hard to know where to start with this — and then it turns out that this strip is a reworking of the text from an earlier strip on a similar theme.
(#1) Today’s strip “Tired Out”, with, oh dear, the alpha male theme made explicit; it is, in any case, all about (hyper)masculinity vs. inferior masculinity
(#2) The 6/2/17 strip “Rubber Fire”, showing (hyper)masculine contempt for analytic academics (I am, of course, the very model of the modern analytic academic, so eat my shorts, brute boy)
Just to get the two strips on display, for discussion to come. My l life has been overfull, but almost entirely in wonderful ways, and that’s something else for me to talk about.
Posted in Academic life, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, My life, Phallicity, Pop culture, Signs and symbols, Vaginality | Leave a Comment »
