Today’s One Big Happy, in which Ruthie deals with personal names:
For kids, personal names are the main identifiers for their friends; for some time, in fact, kids don’t even know their friends’ family names, but kids live in relatively small face-to-face groups, and personal names continue to be the main identifiers within these groups, even after kids learn family names for other purposes.
Posted in Child language, Linguistics in the comics, Names | Leave a Comment »
Today’s Zippy, on music, in the paper, with rhyming names:
The top news in the paper, with diatonic vs. atonal piano music; arena hip hop, Iggy Azalea (more hip hop), and Cole Porter; Lloyd Ackroyd, Mel Snell, Leo Prilaux, and Dean Nerveen (playing “Begin the Beguine”).
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Music, Names, Rhyme | Leave a Comment »
Today’s One Big Happy has Ruthie coping with the word landlubber:
Ruthie takes her grandfather to be saying that he’s a land lover; landlubber is a relatively rare word, certainly rare in the experience of most children.
So then she has to deal with her grandfather’s apparent /b/ in lubber for /v/ in lover — and by analogy she concludes that his version of leave /liv/ would be leabe /lib/.
Posted in Errors, Linguistics in the comics, Phonology | 1 Comment »
From Sandra Boynton, who wanted a live Xmas tree:
(#1)
Boynton is given to sweetly silly, often punful, drawings mostly featuring animals (like this one).
Posted in Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | Leave a Comment »
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics | 2 Comments »
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Puns | Leave a Comment »
Today’s Dilbert is the latest in a series about a new worker in the office, a dinosaur in more senses than one:
Ouch: two senses of the verb date, one used here in a back-formed verb.
Posted in Back formation, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | Leave a Comment »
Today’s Zippy brings us a Pinhead parody:
Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are”, celebrated as an earworm.
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Music, Parodies | Leave a Comment »
Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm:
A play on a famous fugitive quotation, widely attributed to Mae West but never actually traced to her.
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Phallicity, Quotations | Leave a Comment »
Today’s One Big Happy:
permanent record, with the most common, literal sense of permanent — well, most common for adult users, but things are likely to be different for kids like Ruthie.
Posted in Clipping, Linguistics in the comics, Nouning, Truncation, Vocabulary | Leave a Comment »
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