Zippy leads us on an art tour:
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Stickwork is the title of Dougherty’s 2010 book about his outdoor stick sculpture. Fascinating stuff.
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
Stickwork
August 15, 2015Ice cream, roadside fiberglass, Caillebotte, and more
August 13, 2015Today’s Zippy takes us lots of places:
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It shows our Pinhead talking French Impressionism with a roadside ice cream stand that happens to be a fiberglass replica of an ice cream cone. (In Zippy, roadside fiberglass artifacts are almost always chatty.) Degas (gauzy ballerinas), Monet (soft-focus water lilies), but especially Gustave Caillebotte: men scraping floors and flying, drying, laundry.
So…?
August 11, 2015Today’s Zippy features Mr. the Toad, moving during the day to his default personality: seized by rage and a sense of entitlement and issuing sweeping pronouncements, including one on grammar:
Every so often, there’s a fresh wave of complaints about beginning sentences with so, along with speculations about why people do it and where it started. Mr. the Toad forgoes all that in favor of trying to wipe the practice out.
data
August 10, 2015A recent PHD Comics:
C (Count) — and PL — or M (Mass) — and SG — that is the question. But, yes, you need more than one data point.
[Addendum: I have added a Page about postings on C/M, here.]
A hypothetical question?
August 9, 2015The Zits from the 7th:
Jeremy is given to responding to what people say in perfectly literal terms, not taking account of their reasons for framing things the way they do. He’s deliberately no good at Gricean relevance — a tactic that, by his lights, allows him to do nothing at all in situations where people (in particular, his mother) are trying to get him to do something.
As here. Jeremy’s mother asks him a question about his ability, a standard form of indirect request, framed this way out of politeness, so as to avoid issuing a direct command. But Jeremy takes her to be literally asking about his ability, a question asked only in case it might turn out that she wants his help in clearing the table.
Diner aesthetics
August 8, 2015Today’s Zippy:
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It’s the whole package …
This is Mel’s Diner in Lebanon PA:
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From the RoadsideArchitecture site:
Mel’s Diner is an O’Mahony from 1955. This was previously the Lincoln Diner.
Language cartoon Wednesday
August 5, 2015That would be today, with three language-related cartoons in my inbox: a Rhymes With Orange, a Mother Goose and Grimm, and a Bizarro:
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Childhood memories
August 4, 2015
cheesy pickup line
August 4, 2015From George Takei on Facebook, this elaborate visual pun, presented like a captioned cartoon, with an entertaining disjuncture between the image and the caption:
The cheesiest pickup line ever
(Takei is scandously bad about crediting the sources of the things he posts — he just passes on things he comes across — so I have no idea who created this image or where it was originally posted.)
Three content words, each exhibiting crucial lexical ambiguity: the Adj cheesy, the N pickup, the N line.The whole thing is a N + N compound pickup line modified by the superlative of the Adj.
green … egg … (ham)
August 4, 2015It starts with a paper by Elizabeth Closs Traugott (with my assistance) at the recent International Pragmatics Conference in Antwerp, on metatext in the cartoon xkcd (full set of slides linked to here). After Elizabeth gave the paper, she got a comment from someone asking if she knew of a comic strip with mouse-over texts and further texts that emerge from inside those mouse-overs (another layer of cartoon complexity beyond those I have written about) — a daily or weekly strip with a name that Elizabeth thinks had green and egg in it, but of course wasn’t Green Eggs and Ham.
I’ve now been trying to track down this mystery strip, but without success, mostly because Dr. Seuss keeps getting in the way. But I’ve come up with seven interesting new cartoons for your entertainment.
Note: yes, Elizabeth should have written the name down, or gotten the name of the commenter (who was not someone familiar to her), but things tend to be rushed and chaotic at these giant conferences, so it’s easy to slip. Now I’m hoping that someone will recognize the strip from her description (which I’ve paraphrased above).