Today’s Dilbert:
Alice’s swearing seems to have fried the boss’s brain: the power of words.
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
The power of foul language
April 10, 2015Vegan diners and gay opponents
April 8, 2015Into the world of composite expressions, in particular N + N compounds and Adj + N phrases: vegan diner in today’s Bizarro, gay opponents in recent news stories. The first turns out to be pretty straightforward, but the second is more complex. The Bizarro:
Mansplaining in the comics
April 7, 2015Today’s Dilbert has Alice exploding at the mansplainers in her department:
The pointy-headed boss can’t help mansplaining mansplaining.
snit
April 6, 2015This morning’s One Big Happy:
Once again, Ruthie copes with vocabulary she doesn’t know — in this case, the word snit in in a snit, where she has to figure out which of the many senses of the preposition in is at play here.
toodle
April 3, 2015Today’s One Big Happy:
The church lady uses the verb toodle (or possibly tootle), which the kids don’t know. Ruthie, mind on bathrooms, guesses that it’s a polite synonym for pee ‘urinate’, like tinkle.
Sidestepping the taboo item
April 2, 2015Two instances of taboo avoidance today: one from today’s Dilbert, one from a tv ad for DraftKings (a fantasy sports site).
The DraftKings ad (with “you could win a shipload of money”) can be viewed here.
At the diner in Prosaic
April 2, 2015Today’s Zippy takes us to North Scituate RI in this world, and (simultaneously) to the town of Prosaic in Zippyworld:
(#1)
This is not a Ding Dong
March 29, 2015Today’s Zippy:
Another riff on Magritte’s The Betrayal of Images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe), but even sillier than the last version I posted, which at least involved pipes (but thinking pipes). This time it’s (thinking) Ding Dongs. And the scene ends in taco sauce; on Ding Dongs and taco sauce in Zippyland, see here.
