Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm:
A pun — a phonologically perfect pun on pole / Pole — that works here only because the text in the strip is all uppercase, so that the orthographic distinction between the two items vanishes.
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
Ten-foot …
May 19, 2015Jury of English majors
May 18, 2015Via Gregory Ward, a Mark Parisi cartoon from 5/19/09 showing a man in a witness box protesting “I didn’t do nuthin’!”, with the jury all thinking “Ooo! A confession!” — a jury of English majors, as the caption says.
In the popular imagination, English majors are so committed to the idea of grammatical correctness that they are unable to understand non-standard varieties.
Don’t shade your eyes
May 18, 2015Today’s Zits:
Has Jeremy been involved in “the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own” (NOAD2)? Well, he’s certainly passed off as his own work something that was not. His defense appears to be that there is no person whose work this was; he wasn’t stealing from anyone. A bold move, but one that’s not flying with his teacher.
Adj + N + N
May 17, 2015Today’s Zippy dwells on a parsing ambiguity:
Two parsings for the Adj + N + N permanent laundry markers:
(1) Adj + [ N + N ] ‘laundry markers that are permanent’ (Griffy’s intent)
(2) [ Adj + N ] + N ‘markers for permanent laundry’ (Zippy’s understanding)
A ring-tailed lemur type
May 16, 2015In the May 18th New Yorker, this lovely Charlie Hankin cartoon:
(#1)
On the caption: this is a show-business meme: We don’t want X; we want an X type. (We don’t want Whoopi Goldberg; we want a Whoopi Goldberg type.) But then there’s the image of a ring-tailed lemur, looking non-plussed — but this is exactly the way the creatures look in the wild:
(#2)
An attachment problem
May 16, 2015Today’s One Big Happy:
Ruthie intends High Attachment for the adverb again, with the adverb modifying the VP with head feel, and that’s a possible parsing. But Low Attachment, with again modifying the VP with head smashing, is the default parsing, and that’s how Ruthie’s grandmother understands things.
Devious undermining
May 15, 2015Today’s Dilbert, with Alice neatly knifing Ted in the back:
Alice plants the idea in Ted’s head of using social media to make someone look bad, thus tempting him to use the tactic on her. Big pragmatic win for Alice, especially since she has no social media accounts of her own and will look blameless.
Androids on the march
May 15, 2015Sexy Friday continues, with the war between the sexes in today’s Scenes From a Multiverse:
First, misogynoids launched against the women, then misandroids launched in retaliation, sowing the boner-destroying deathsterone.
Judge Judy: the early days
May 14, 2015Today’s Zippy, featuring Judge Judy and her hectoring courtroom speech style:
Judge Judy is something of a preoccupation in Zippy, often in combination with Donald Trump (for instance, #2 on 3/17/14, #1 on 5/26/14), sometimes with other pop culture icons (JJ, Howie Mandel, and Dr. Phil on 8/17/13).
Drawing and caption
May 12, 2015Another in a series about what you have to know to understand what’s going on in a cartoon. This time, the cartoon is by Paul Noth, in the May 11th New Yorker:
(#1)