Linguistics in the comics | Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category

Antacid or online tv?

August 28, 2015

Yesterday’s Zippy, with Griffy and Zippy as seniors on an outing with their walkers:

Are those names antacids or online tv services? Take two Acorns and watch some prime-time Nexium.

We’ve been in X-or-Y-land before, in “Cheese or font?” and “Cheese or font: The sequel”, where we also visited “Gay or Eurotrash?”, “X Face or O-Face?”, and “Plant or Disease?” (coreopsis: plant or disease?, stenosis: plant or disease?). The first and last are about names, the other two about properties of a referent.

(more…)

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Names, Semantics | Leave a Comment »

Jeremy drops an F-bomb

August 26, 2015

In Today’s Zits:

I especially like the F-bomb icon.

For your use: an icon:

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Signs and symbols, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

Warnings on the label

August 26, 2015

Yesteday’s Bizarro

Trying to cover every base, attempting to protect the maker from any imaginable misuse of the product by the buyer.

Oh yes, do not break off legs and stick them up your nose.

Posted in Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

going better with

August 25, 2015

Today’s Zits:

Jeremy plays with the template

GBW (GoesBetterWith): Nothing goes better with X than Y

conveying something like ‘X and Y go very well together’; either X or Y can be taken to be the primary component in the combination.

But for Jeremy in the cartoon, X = Y, so what he’s conveying is that X is really really good. More bacon! More bacon!

GBW is a variation on an expression, but an expression that’s only weakly conventionalized: it can straightforwardly be understood literally, but it comes with an air of familiarity. It’s certainly not an snowclone, and it might not even count as a playful variation on some familiar expression. What would the model be?

(more…)

Posted in Eggcorns, Formulaic language, Linguistics in the comics, Snowclones | 1 Comment »

What a hoot!

August 24, 2015

This morning’s Mother Goose and Grimm turns on a simple, silly ambiguity, but then the story gets more complicated:

(#1)

First pass: hooters (1) ‘creatures that hoot, i.e., owls’ (straightforward derivational morphology, but specialized semantically) vs. Hooters, the restaurant chain fixated on hooters (2) N. Amer. vulgar slang for ‘a woman’s breasts’ (NOAD2).

Then there’s another sense, on which a Bizarro cartoon (posted here as #3 on 5/2/14) turns: hooters (3) informal ‘noses, esp. big noses’ vs. Hooters.

And at least one other important sense: hooter (4) esp. Brit. ‘an automobile horn’ — that is, a thing that hoots (more straightforward derivational morphology).

But what about senses (3) and (2)?

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Derivation, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphors, Morphology, Slang | 3 Comments »

Fidel of the Castro

August 23, 2015

The latest Funny Times arrived a couple days ago, and as usual there was a bunch of cartoons I laughed at, and some I wanted to post, but I couldn’t find usable copies or even identify the artists, despite trying several routes. Here’s my favorite of the set, a cartoon with no signature at all, and a style I didn’t recognize. So here, a description.

We see a burly Fidel Castro, with a smoking cigar in his hand and heavy-duty pecs on display, one notably pierced, plus metal stars in one pierced ear and on his epaulets. Titled as above: Fidel of the Castro, punning on his family name and the name of the San Francisco street that gives its name to The Castro, the gayborhood.

Leads to the cartoon would be much appreciated.

Posted in Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Falling trees

August 23, 2015

Yesterday’s Bizarro puts a fresh twist on an old philosophical puzzle:

Previously on this blog, a Zippy (posted 10/15/12) on a related theme, with the punning punch line:

If a red-breasted nuthatch sings in a forest & there’s no one there to google it, did it post a tweet?

So what does it refer to in the top panel? In the old conundrum, it refers to the falling of the tree. But in the bottom panel, it refers to the tree itself, which turns out to have the power of speech; it can certainly make a sound (of its own volition).

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Linguistics in the comics, Perception, Philosophy | 1 Comment »

Bizarro: use and mention

August 21, 2015

Yesterday’s Bizarro:

The student’s query, as represented by the punctuation in the strip, mentions the words “I” and “you”; the query is about words. The teacher has access only to what the student says (not her intentions as indicated by the punctuation), so the teacher takes the question to be about people, expressed in non-standard subject-verb agreement (“What is you?”) — and the teacher then uses non-standard agreement as well (“I is the teacher”).

(more…)

Posted in Dialects, Linguistics in the comics, Use and mention | Leave a Comment »

Braldt Bralds

August 21, 2015

Another artist in the borderlands between graphic art, illustration, and cartooning: the creator of this work, “Rainbow Whiskers”, which my family picked up at the Columbus Museum of Art in a sale of reproductions around 1980:

(#1)