Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
April 5, 2024
From Joelle Stepien Bailard on Facebook yesterday, this Tintin panel (whose specific source I do not know), in which Tintin and Capt. Haddock finally reach the famous machine for understanding women:
bon sang!, Capt. Haddock exclaims (literally ‘good blood’, used as an exclamation covering a range of high affect: roughly ‘Damn it!’); and Tintin prefaces his announcement of their amazing find with alors voila enfin ‘here it is finally’
La célềbre machine is a monster of science-fantasy invention, the sort of unimaginably intricate device that might revivify corpses, transport people through time, or launch a fleet of rocket ships to destinations light-years from the earth. But this one is devoted to understanding women, as if this project were on a par with revivifying corpses, transporting people through time, and launching a fleet of rocket ships to destinations light-years from the earth.
Men! I cry out, peevishly, at the ways of normative masculinity. As women and gay men are given to doing (often together, since many of our annoyances are shared).
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Posted in AI, French, Gender and sexuality, Language and the sexes, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity | 2 Comments »
April 2, 2024
An old One Big Happy strip, recently up in my comics feed, has Ruthie once again coping with vocabulary unfamiliar to her:
Cirque du Soleil (presumably pronounced in English, as if it were Sirk do sew-lay), obstetrician, and false alarm (which Ruthie takes to be circus ole, lobstertrician, and fossil arm, respectively). These are three different cases, as I’ll explain below.
But then — knowing that in the world around her, different people have different pronunciations for expressions — she takes her mother’s intended corrections of her creative misinterpretations to be just repetitions of them (“Mom always repeats the stuff I say”), but with a pronunciation alternative to hers. Attempted corrections of kids often run aground in similar ways.
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Posted in Dialects, Linguistics in the comics, Phonetics, Variation | Leave a Comment »
April 1, 2024
🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the new month, 🃏 🃏 🃏 three jokers for April Fool’s Day, and 🌼 🌼 🌼 three jaunes d’Avril. yellow flowers of April, all this as we turn on a dime from yesterday’s folk-custom bunnies of Easter to today’s monthly rabbits; for this intensely leporine occasion, a Maria Scrivan hare-pun cartoon:
(#1) (phonologically perfect) pun hare on model hair, taking advantage of I love what you’ve done with your hair as an common exemplar of the stock expression (I) love what you’ve done with X; a cartoon posted on Facebook by Probal Dasgupta, who reported, “Even I groaned at this one”
Things to talk about here: my use of turn on a dime just above; Easter + April Fool’s; the yellow flowers of April (which will bring us to Jane Avril — Fr. Avril ‘April’); and the stock expression (I) love what you’ve done with X.
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Posted in Art, Color, Constructions, Dancers, Formulaic language, French, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and plants, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Pragmatics, Puns, Signs and symbols, Speech acts, Stock expressions, Style and register, Syntax | 1 Comment »
March 30, 2024
Thanks to a pointer from Jeff Bowles, this first panel from a Peanuts strip (dated by Charles Schulz as from 2/16/60), now a candidate for my on-line icon:
(#1) Schroeder at his toy piano, on which rests a somnolent Snoopy, emitting the cartoon Z of sleep (also the Zwicky initial); for further personal meaningfulness, I am a former pianist (still an enthusiast of the piano repertory), now an analyst of the comics (among other things)
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Posted in Art, Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Mammoths, Mascots, Music, My life, Penguins, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »
March 28, 2024
It’s Holy Thursday, and today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro: cartoon jumps the Easter gun, / with an outrageous rabbit pun:
Wayno’s title: “Side Effects May Include Hallucinations” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page)
model /ístǝr/ Easter, pun /íθǝr/ ether, shared /í…ǝr/, with coronal obstruents between the two syllabics, so not bad for an imperfect pun; meanwhile, the Easter bunny is administering ether as an anesthetic, so the pun fits the image nicely
Two things: Holy Thursday (and Easter Sunday); and anesthetic ether.
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Posted in Holidays, Language and medicine, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture, Puns | Leave a Comment »
March 23, 2024
An old One Big Happy strip in my comics feed today — posted here on 3/28/14 in “OBH roundup”, but with little comment — in which Ruthie reveals her aide-memoire for the name of a fish her mother sometimes cooks for dinner:
(#1) buncher, crowder? — or flocker, packer, ganger, batcher, schooler? — but actually grouper
At this point, you’re probably thinking that groupers are so called because they travel in schools, that is, in a kind of group. But no; there’s an etymological surprise here.
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Posted in Etymology, Language and animals, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Memory, Portuguese, Semantics of compounds | Leave a Comment »
March 22, 2024
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon, with yet another pun on the name of a rock band; this time it’s Rage Against the Machine that’s being punned on:
(#1) Wayno’s title: “Tomato Based Ideology”, alluding to the fact that what’s commonly called ragu (or Bolognese sauce) in the US is tomato-based (and sometimes meatless, as in the “traditional” variety of the commercial brand RAGÚ), though classic Italian ragù (aka Bolognese sauce) is a meat-based sauce with only a bit of tomato in it, and though the most common US name for meatless tomato-based pasta sauce is just spaghetti sauce (in fancier settings, AmE marinara sauce) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
The text in the speech balloon — with a RATM anti-corporate political message — coming from a thoroughly American source, emphasizes the meaty side of (some) American ragu; this is ragu used to name what is mostly called just spaghetti sauce in the US (a tomato-based sauce with substantial amounts of browned minced meat, usually ground beef, in it), though in fancier settings this everyday pasta sauce might be billed as AmE Bolognese sauce.
Obviously, food naming in this domain is a gigantic rat’s nest, but vocabulary isn’t the point of the cartoon, the band name pun is, so I’ll put off the lexicography for the moment and focus first on the pun and the rock band.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Italian, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Puns | Leave a Comment »
March 21, 2024
Briefly noted: today’s Zippy strip, in which our Pinhead reflects on trendy menu language at a carnival food stand:
(#1) Corn-dog foam is all the rage, especially if you can get it artisanal, curated, hand-selected, rustic, on a stick, buddy, on a fuckin’ stick, with almond milk, 2 pumps of caramel, cold foam, extra crispy with locally sourced tripe in Sichuan chili sauce, oh I seem to have lost track of things, what were you asking?
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Posted in Language and food, Linguistics in the comics | 1 Comment »
March 20, 2024
(Very much a brief MQoS Not Dead Yet posting on my part, while I cope with a complex posting on the wonders of VPE in English)
In an old One Big Happy strip that came up in my comics feed this morning, two of the kids — Ruthie and the neighbor boy James — undertake to go on a dinosaur hunt, expecting the creatures to be easy to find because, according to James, they’re a stink:
Ruthie’s grandfather is about to explain to James the difference between extinct and a stink
Once again, the kids are coping with unfamiliar, technical vocabulary by interpreting it, eggcornishly, as more familiar material. Something of a stretch in this case, though extinct and a stink are indeed phonologically similar. I do wonder if there have been kids who reinterpreted extinct this way, or whether Rick Detorie (the cartoonist) merely imagined a reinterpretation that might have happened. Oh, the things that might have been!
(The adjective extinct is historically a specialized variant of extinguished, so calls to mind the vivid image of these creatures having their flame of life quenched, put out.)
Posted in Eggcorns, Linguistics in the comics, Technical and ordinary language | 2 Comments »
