Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm:
(#1)
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.
Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, Language and food, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture | Leave a Comment »
The 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):
(#1)
(#2)
Posted in Ambiguity, Chiasmus, Compounds, Figurative language, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »
Passed on to me, this 2007 Phil Selby cartoon:
(#1)
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.
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Style and register, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
Today’s Calvin and Hobbes features the dreaded snow shark:
(#1)
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.
Posted in Compounds, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Movies, Pop culture | 1 Comment »
A 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!”
Posted in Language in the media, Linguistics in the comics, Style and register | Leave a Comment »
Yesterday’s Zippy has our Pinhead playing with catchphrases:
More grist for my posting mill; I’m working on a posting about:
Orin Hargraves. 2014. It’s Been Said Before: A Guide to the Use and Abuse of Clichés. Oxford.
Posted in Books, Formulaic language, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »
In Zits, yesterday and today, on what people say and what listeners (well, Jeremy) make of that:
(#1)
(#2)
Two different phenomena here. In #1, Jeremy calculates the consequences of what Sara is saying and concludes that he should escape. In #2, Jeremy suffers from selective attention, editing out the parts of what his father said that he doesn’t want to hear (not unlike the many cartoons of the form: “what we say – what dogs hear”).
xx
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics | Leave a Comment »
Today’s One Big Happy:
gargoyle / gargle
The cartoonist, Rick Detorie, goes to some lengths to put Ruthie in situations where she’s confronted with vocabulary that will be unfamiliar to her. Recall Ruthie in an art museum (#2 in this posting), where she gets to cope with odalisque.
Posted in Errors, Linguistics in the comics, Words | Leave a Comment »
Today’s Zippy, with a cartoon transformation:
The three Dingburgers admiring Little Zippy (already cartoon characters) become more and more like cartoon characters, more cartoonish, more cartoony: bigger eyes, bigger ears, longer noses.
Posted in Cartoon conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Playful morphology | Leave a Comment »
Today’s Scenes From a Multiverse (on-line here) has the superhero Colonel UnitedStates woken from 70 years of sleep:
Of course, not to their faces! Insults go behind people’s backs!
Posted in Insults, Language and gender, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »
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