Today’s Zippy, on fiberglass statuary as roadside icons:
(#1)
A continuing theme in Zippy: Bob’s Big Boy, Doggie Diner dog-heads, Happy Chef, Muffler Man (the central figure in this strip).
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
Happy Chef
January 12, 2015Annals of slash: dan mai
January 11, 2015In the most recent (December/January) issue of the Advocate (the lgbt news magazine), a story “Where Slash Fiction Makes for Dangerous Words: Slash fiction arrives and thrives in China, despite the constant threat of government crackdowns” by Yuan Ren, beginning:
Earlier this year, during a nationwide clampdown on online pornography, some 20 writers, allegedly under contract with “illegal erotic novel Web sites,” were arrested in Henan province, China, and numerous Web sites with explicit written and visual content were shut down. Most of these writers were young women, many of whom, according to footage from Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong broadcaster, were in their 20s, oblivious to the fact that they were breaking the law. The incident followed a similar spate of arrests in 2011 — again of young female writers.
The women were all writers of gay fiction, known as dan mei, which over the past two decades has gained a vast and dedicated following in China, a country where homosexuality is still heavily stigmatized.
manspreading
January 11, 2015Joe Dator’s January 9th New Yorker daily cartoon:
(#1)
Extreme manspreading on the New York subway.
Weak heel
January 10, 2015Passed on to me by Mike Pope, this cartoon with a complex pun:
The noun heel (the body part) and the verb heel — “(of a dog) follow closely behind its owner: these dogs are born with the instinctive urge to heel (NOAD2) — wrapped together with the idiom Achilles heel.
Advice from Weenie Beenie
January 9, 2015
Surrender to autocorrect
January 8, 2015A Mike Gruhn WebDonuts cartoon, with autocorrect in skywriting:
As seen in the Wizard of Oh.
Mort Gerberg
January 7, 2015Three evolution cartoons from New Yorker cartoonist Mort Gerberg:
From 8/24/92:
(#1)
From 3/20/95:
(#2)
From 12/24/01:
(#3)
Outrageous, contagious, whatever
January 7, 2015Ruthie in One Big Happy continues her grappling with English vocabulary:
You might think that outrageous and contagious are not very close phonologically — /awtr/ vs. /kǝnt/ — but they are rhyming trisyllables in a very small lexical space: courageous is the only other such word of any frequency. So in the lexicon that Ruthie might have been exposed to, they are very close indeed.
Dingburg noir
January 6, 2015The Zippy of 8/12/14 (which seems to have fallen into a wrinkle in time):
An exercise in tracking down (some of) the references.
Pun pun
January 5, 2015Passed on by Betsy Herrington and John Lawler:
A cartoon, or playful image (I’m not entirely sure how to classify some of these things), with a pun involving puns.
[Amended 1/7/15: Mary Beckman has identified the source, a TearablePuns website! In operation since 2012. People submit puns; these are posted one by one, and then in posters like the one above. The current poster collection is #4.]