In today’s One Big Happy, Ruthie once again understands a rare and unusual expression (the word comfit) in terms more familiar to her:
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I very much doubt that I knew the word comfit when I was 6.
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
Comfits
January 29, 2015Zippy’s in Kansas anymore
January 28, 2015In today’s Zippy, our Pinhead takes a road trip to Kansas:
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Hutchinson, Goodland, Cawker City, Lawrence, Wichita.
The general store
January 26, 2015From the January 26th New Yorker, a cartoon by Liana Finck:
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A store that deals with things from highly general categories: it sells items, for which it takes money.
Captain Rehab
January 26, 2015Found in the latest Funny Times, a Speed Bump cartoon from September 30th:
A distant pun (rehab – Ahab) that works only if you recognize both pieces of background: the story of Melville’s Moby-Dick and the conventions of talk therapy.
Finding Jesus
January 25, 2015Yet another cartoon — this seems to be Cartoon Weekend — this time another one about proselytizing, following on the Phil Selby “We’d like to talk to you about cheeses” cartoon: a Tim Whyatt strip passed on to me by Michael Covarrubias:
A play on find Jesus: literal find ‘discover (someone or something) after a deliberate search’ (NOAD2) vs. the figurative find Jesus ‘develop a personal relationship with God’.
What would you do?
January 25, 2015Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm:
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Without a piece of cultural background, this is just a silly story about a polar bear opening a bar in the Klondike. If you have that background, it’s a bit of language play turning on the ambiguity of Klondike bar.
Bizarro’s 30th
January 24, 2015The Comics Kingdom site tells me that the 21st was the 30th anniversary of Bizarro comics by Don Piraro, the first having been published on 1/21/85. Here are two Bizarros with linguistic content that haven’t been blogged on here: one from 12/18/13, one from much earlier, possibly from 3/29/89 (I have trouble reading the data):
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Cheeses
January 24, 2015Passed on to me, this 2007 Phil Selby cartoon:
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A take-off on door-to-door evangelizing, by (in particular) Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, using the pun Jesus – cheeses to move things to the world of mice, who are famously fond of cheese.
Shark!
January 24, 2015Today’s Calvin and Hobbes features the dreaded snow shark:
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It all started with Steven Spielberg’s 1975 movie Jaws, with its threatening fins moving through the water and its ominous music. In the cartoon, the fins are moving through the snow, advancing on the hapless snowman.
Calvin’s genre competence
January 23, 2015A while back, we witnessed Calvin’s competence in writing tabloid headlines. Yesterday he took on talk radio:
“Imagine getting paid to act like a six-year-old!”