Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category

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bigger

November 13, 2014

Today’s One Big Happy has Ruthie and James at cross-purposes on the semantics of bigger:

The adjective big and its comparative form bigger are understood with reference to some scale S: X is big if it’s towards the high end of S, and X is bigger than Y if it’s higher on S than Y is. What distinguishes Ruthie and James is the S that they’re appealing to. For Ruthie, S is the ordering of natural numbers 1, 2, 3, … (which makes sense in the strip, since the context is a discussion of arithmetic), but for James, it’s the ordering of written symbols according to their physical size.

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Semantics | Leave a Comment »

Two-fisted, bruised-knuckle science

November 13, 2014

Yesterday’s Scenes From a Multiverse (“Going Rogue”, on-line here) gets scientifically aggressive:

Note the names of the weaponry, with their references to the two faces of American science in the popular media, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye.

(more…)

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Names, Science | Leave a Comment »

Monday quartet

November 10, 2014

Four varied cartoons in this morning’s crop: a Zits on address terms; a Scenes From a Multiverse on symbols; a Rhymes With Orange on case-marking of pronouns with than; and a Zippy reviving Doggie Diner.

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(#2)

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(#4)

One by one …

(more…)

Posted in Address terms, Diners, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Peeving, Phallicity, Pronoun case, Usage advice | 1 Comment »

Saturday trio

November 8, 2014

In today’s comics crop, a Zits on language and the sexes (once again), a Rhymes With Orange with language play, and a Bizarro metacartoon on the visual conventions of the comics:

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(#3)

(more…)

Posted in Comic conventions, Language and gender, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »

Language nerd

November 6, 2014

The xkcd, Language Nerd, for the 5th:

A little festival of part-of-speech conversion, with adverbing, verbing, and adjectiving. The verbs to adverb, to verb, and to adjective are, of course, themselves all verbings of nouns.

(The mouseover text introduces still another grammatical topic: “Not to go all sentence fragment on you…”)

Then there’s the construction in go (all) X (on s.o.), where X is a nominal — here, a N + N compound (language nerd, sentence fragment) — converted to an adverbial in construction with the verb go.

There I am, going (all) linguist (on you).

Posted in Conversion, Linguistics in the comics, Verbing | Leave a Comment »

Multiverse pun

November 3, 2014

Now on sale at the Scenes From a Multiverse site, a t-shirt made from a Jon Rosenberg cartoon:

Civil serpents, a pun on civil servants. Imperfect, but very close phonologically (/p/ vs. /v/).

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Hipster chronicles

October 31, 2014

An illustration: the cover of the 11/3/14 New Yorker, Peter de Sève’s “Hip Hops”, with a hipster doing a beer tasting in a hipster bar:

More on the artist and the story behind this illustration later. But first, on hipster.

(more…)

Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Ordinary vs. technical lg, Social life | 1 Comment »

Impostor Syndrome

October 30, 2014

A piece on this phenomenon, posted recently on Facebook, came with this Brad(ford) Veley cartoon:

Note the variant spellings.

(more…)

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Spelling | 1 Comment »

Mammoth silliness

October 30, 2014

From the comic strip The Argyle Sweater on the 28th:

Think of types of dogs, and translate that into mammoths. Mammoths are a bit large for some of these activities, but then there’s the oxymoronic toy mammoth.

(more…)

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Mammoths | Leave a Comment »

Ruthie’s classic

October 29, 2014

Yesterday’s One Big Happy, with Ruthie treating the word classic (which she had surely heard before but clearly had not figured out what it meant) as a phrase:

Prosodically, classic and class sick are quite different: the first has an accented syllable followed by an unaccented one, the second has two accented syllables, with the first heavier than the second. Segmentally, they are very similar; although in a careful pronunciation, there are two occurrences of /s/ in class sick, one from each word (but only one occurrence in classic), in ordinary connected speech the first /s/ is suppressed, so that the two expressions are segmentally identical.

Posted in Errors, Linguistics in the comics, Prosody | 1 Comment »

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