Linguistics in the comics | Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category

Jim Dultz

April 21, 2015

A cartoonist, with this cartoon in the May issue of Funny Times:

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This works pretty well as a pun in print — Oedipus Rex / Oedipus Rx — with the mother theme and the prescription theme combined. Apparently there are people who treat the abbreviation Rx as an initialism /ar ɛks/, a noun meaning ‘prescription’ (“an Rx for Viagra”), and for them Oedipus Rx works as a (moderately distant) pun in pronunciation as well.

Now: more on this, a note on the cartoonist, and a couple more punning cartoons from him.

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Posted in Abbreviation, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | Leave a Comment »

The swim-up bar

April 20, 2015

A Rhymes With Orange of 8/27/14, found in the May issue of Funny Times:

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Three things: on swim-up bars; on the compound swim-up bar; on understanding the cartoon.

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Posted in Compounds, Linguistics in the comics | 1 Comment »

Laughter and forgetting

April 20, 2015

Today’s Zippy, set in the town of Prosaic:

With apologies to Milan Kundera, it’s the strip of laughter and forgetting: forgetting the catch-phrase, forgetting to rewire the CD remote, forgetting that Dingburg is only 12 miles away. Apparently Happy Boy interferes with memory.

(Note that there are three argument structures for forget here: forget NP, forget to VP, forget that S; remember and, for that matter, know have the same possibilities.)

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Posted in Argument structure, Books, Linguistics in the comics, Memory | Leave a Comment »

More Freaks

April 19, 2015

Today’s Zippy goes back to the world of Tod Browning’s Freaks:

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From “Pip and Flip Snow: the pinheads of Freaks” by J. Tithonus Pednaud on The Human Marvels site:

Best known for their heartwarming roles in the 1932 film Freaks, where they starred in scenes alongside fellow famous pinhead Schlitzie, the Snow sisters were well-known staples of the World Circus Sideshow at Coney.

Usually promoted professionally as Pip and Flip, Jenny Lee Snow and Elvira Snow were billed as Pip and Zip in Freaks.

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Movies | Leave a Comment »

Word entertainment

April 19, 2015

Today’s One Big Happy:

Inherently funny words: beanies, tweezers, snood. Or from the point of view of the audience: word entertainment.

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Usage attitudes | 4 Comments »

Artificial elephants and X Must Die! movies

April 18, 2015

Today’s Zippy:

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This cartoon links to a long series of strips on the invented cartoon character Happy Boy in the town of Prosaic (a “normal” place close to the surreal Dingburg) — a series that I find tedious (and linguistically uninteresting) and haven’t posted about. But here we get amazing elephants (note the cartoon’s title “Tusk, Tusk”, a play on tsk tsk) and a pointer to movies with titles using the snowclonic pattern “X Must Die!”.

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Movies, Snowclones | 1 Comment »

Sevens

April 17, 2015

An xkcd (from 9/5/14) that I seem to have overlooked:

The sevens here: Disney’s seven dwarfs, the seven major taxonomic ranks, the seven continents, the seven deadly sins, seven layer dip, the seven layers of the OSI model [Open Systems Interconnection model], the seven wonders of the ancient world.

In the mouseover, we get more: seven days of the week, the Seven Sisters colleges, the seven seas, the seven colors of the rainbow, the Pleiades (seven sisters), the seven Habits of Highly Effective People, the seven seals in the Book of Revelation.

The number 7 is freighted with meaning.

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Numbers | 1 Comment »

The Big Kowalski

April 17, 2015

A Liam Francis Walsh cartoon in the latest (April 20th) New Yorker:

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A mashup — a kind of portmanteau — of two movies: the 1951 film adaptation of Tennessee Wiliams’s dramatic play A Streetcar Named Desire, with Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski (and Kim Hunter as his wife Stella); and the 1998 comedy The Big Lebowski, with Jeff Bridges as The Dude. The scene setting (with Dude Stanley at the bottom of an ornate stairway, calling up to Stella) shows Stanley from Streetcar; but Dude Stanley looks, dresses, and talks like The Dude.

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Posted in Actors, Linguistics in the comics, Movies, Portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »