Two cartoons today touching on conventions of the comics: A Calvin and Hobbes on conventional characters in the comics and a Zippy on the conventions of surrealistic cartooning:
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Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
Comic conventions
February 26, 2015The thieving sap spitter
February 26, 2015Today’s Bizarro, which is, well, bizarre:
Not only do we have a thieving bird that carries off letters of the alphabet, we have one that takes them from the cartoon itself. Bizarre indeed.
Return of the word avalanche
February 26, 2015Yesterday’s Pearls Before Swine, with a word avalanche:
As before in Pearls, the strip goes meta when the cartoonist is taken to task for his word play.
fraug
February 25, 2015Yesterday’s Rhymes With Orange:
Presumably Hilary Price’s intention was that the spelling FRAUG, pronounced [frɔ:ɡ], should represent a combination of FROG — pronounced [frɑ:ɡ] or [frɔ:ɡ], depending on your variety of American English — and FRAUD, pronounced [frɔ:d] for many American speakers, but [frɑ:d] for American speakers who level [ɔ:] and [ɑ:] in favor of the latter (the “COT-CAUGHT merger”: both these words are pronounced [kɑ:t], DAWN and DON are both [dɑ:n], and SHAW and SHAH are both [ʃɑ:]).
[Addendum: an earlier posting on frog and fraud has a Discover Card commercial that plays on a confusion between the two.]
Ode to Almond Joy
February 24, 2015Today’s Zippy, with a candy-bar parody of Schiller’s Ode to Joy (An der Freude), used by Beethoven in the last movement of his Ninth Symphony:
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Almond Joy, Mounds, Mars bars! Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t.
gormless
February 23, 2015Today’s One Big Happy, in which it turns out that Ruthie isn’t the only character who’s unsure about word meanings:
NOAD2 identifies gormless as informal and specifically British, so it’s no surprise that the adults don’t know what it means (though the appalling Avis takes it back to a putative noun stem gorm, which she treats as a mass noun (gormless ‘without gorm, lacking gorm’), though it could be a count noun (gormless ‘without gorms, lacking gorms’)).
lost
February 22, 2015Today’s Bizarro, continuing Piraro’s ambiguity theme:
PST lost of the transitive verb lose, used here in a specialized subsense of a ‘be deprived of’ sense. From NOAD2:
be deprived of (a close relative or friend) through their death or as a result of the breaking off of a relationship: she lost her husband in the fire.
This in contrast to an ‘unable to find’ sense:
become unable to find (something or someone): I’ve lost the car keys.
How do we work out that these two senses intersect in the cartoon?
Tech talk
February 21, 2015Today’s Dilbert, in which the pointy-headed boss asks for investment advice:
The boss is fine with colorful figurative jargon in the investment world, but balks at the term diversification because of the spelling challenges it presents.
The Zippyclone again
February 21, 2015Today’s Zippy:
Barreling from a first date towards mid-life in three panels. And then we get “Am I th’ divorced father of 2.3 kids with visitation rights yet?!”, a 1sg variant of the Are We X Yet snowclone with a complex X — both features Bill Griffith has exploited before.
Bird seed
February 20, 2015Yesterday, a Bizarro with an ambiguity in auto parts. Today, another ambiguity, somewhat simpler than that one:
Two interpretations for the N + N compound bird seed, differing in the semantic relationship between the head N seed and the accompanying N bird — one like parrot seed ‘seed to give parrots, to feed parrots’, one like grass seed ‘seed of grass, i.e., of the grass plant; seed to grow grass from’.