Today’s Bizarro, exploiting an unexpected ambiguity:
It’s all in the parts. Components (of an automobile) or a role in a dramatic work (which, in this case, is to be taken by — surprise! — an automobile).
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
Auto parts
February 19, 2015Ruthie strikes again
February 15, 2015The One Big Happy that came by me today:
Once again, Ruthie latches onto a word she’s familiar with that fits pretty well with the phonological input. In this case, the phonological distance is considerable (and the orthographic distance is smaller).
Two Zippys
February 14, 2015Two recent Zippys, yesterday with the existential pleasures of an empty diner and today with a fantasized Zippy Mart, but both with ambiguities in their titles:
(#1)
(#2)
The main content of these strips is familiar Zipsurrealism. Here I’m all about the titles.
A forest of symbols in a time of love
February 14, 2015Vatentine’s Day sets off an avalanche of greeting cards, from the sloppily sentimental through the joking — lots and lots of puns — to the off-color and the openly insulting. Just about any emotion you can imagine can be packaged into a Valentine’s Day card. Here’s one from a friend to me this year, with a pun (“Love you a bunch!”) and a penguin: “just a bit twee”, the sender wrote, but adding in mitigation that at least it had a penguin:
(#1)
And then we get this remarkable object, a veritable forest of sexual imagery:
(#2)
Too much whelm
February 12, 2015
More word confusion
February 10, 2015Today’s One Big Happy:
Ruthie confuses decaffeinated and decapitated, which I would have thought was an unlikely glitch, since both are relatively rare words (though phonologically very similar) — but maybe with decapitations in the news recently, the second word was more salient for her (how much current news do 6-year-olds get?).
And then she creates a portmanteau, decapinated, of the two words.
Technically
February 10, 2015The xkcd from January 19th (thanks to Ann Burlingham)):
Um, technically, that sentence begins with well, not technically. But let that pass.
Technically serves to announce that some expression — like the word bug — is going to be used in a specialized technical sense, not in its ordinary-language sense, and that information is rarely useful in context; usually it just functions as one-upmanship.
Snowed in
February 10, 2015A daily New Yorker cartoon by Emily Flake:
(#1)
This is comprehensible at one level, without any further background information: the kid’s boredom has driven him to a murderous rage. But it’s much richer if you know your movies.
Flightless no more
February 9, 2015Today’s Bizarro:
Penguins can fly.
Two Tundra cartoons on the flightlessness of penguins: #1 on 6/12/13 (“Everyone knows penguins can’t fly” — so they have to drive) and on 8/5/13 (penguin on the no-fly list).
Another kind of nose job
February 6, 2015(Warning: high sexual content.)
Today’s Zippy:
(#1)
Three things, starting (1) with what looks like a glory hole for nasal sex — affording the opportunity for (2) a nose job in a new (sexual rather than surgical) sense — and (3) transforming those who use it into cartoon characters.