Yesterday’s Frazz:
The strip turns on an ambiguity of the (separable) V + Prt combination throw out: the high-frequency sense ‘discard’ and the very specialized sense in throw out one’s back ‘experience sudden acute back pain’. Naturally, kids go for the ‘discard’ sense.
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Today’s Pearls Before Swine:
Truth by assertion.
Compare other alternatives to truth based on reality (discussion here): reporting of facts based on fear vs. based on reality (via evidence), and truth created from faith, assumption, or ideology vs. based on reality (via evidence). Evidence comes out poorly in these confrontations.
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Today’s Zits, with a distraught Jeremy:
The troubling text:
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
Has a very shiny nose
And if you ever saw it
You would even say it glows
All of the other reindeer
Used to laugh and call him names
They never let poor Rudolph
Join in any reindeer games
Posted in Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Music | Leave a Comment »
A cartoon by Charlie Hankin from the December 22&29 New Yorker:
(#!)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art viewed as Neapolitan ice cream.
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Today’s Calvin and Hobbes:
Alas, some art, even great art, is transitory, impermanent. Snowmen, sand castles, patterns in fallen leaves, and much more.
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Today’s Zippy, in which our Pinhead fails at telepathic communication:
(#1)
And the diner is: the Main Street Diner in Plainville CT.
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Today’s Dilbert:
No, he didn’t know that he didn’t know much. The semantics is clear, but the advisor’s ignorance is profound.
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(Not much linguistic in this, but it tickled my fancy.)
Today’s Zippy:
An exercise in Zippyesque surrealism.
Note that the two panels have “the same” characters in them, doing the same things, but with everyone transformed by the portal in the second panel: the woman with a wrap on her arm becomes a Pinhead with a folded muu-muu on her arm, and so on.
And there’s no going back.
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Today’s Doonesbury comments painfully on journalistic practices:
The term reality-based was coined in opposition to faith-based (relying on faith, assumption, or ideology), but here we see a new version of the contrast, in opposition to fear-based.
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A Wrong Hands cartoon by John Atkinson, from 9/18/12:
(#1)
What happens when you take idioms literally.
Posted in Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus | 3 Comments »
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