Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category

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Sandwich and pie at the Zipperverse Diner

January 12, 2024

(The very last section of this posting, on the name Monty Crisco, gets right down to man-on-man sex in street language, so is out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest; the rest of the posting is quirky but not indecent)

The 1/4 Zippy the Pinhead strip takes us back to Zippy’s imagined perverse version of the (now-defunct) Miss Albany Diner in Albany NY — call it the Zipperverse Diner — and its blackboard menu above the counter:


(#1) The messages on the board are about the day’s offerings, but neither sandwiches nor pies are mentioned; meanwhile, Monte Cristo sandwiches are a not-uncommon diner offering, but Zippy maintains, perversely, that the sandwich name is correctly spelled Monty Crisco (and you don’t want to think about the ingredients or how you eat the thing); and Nesselrode pie is a bit of elegance far from any ordinary diner’s pie offerings, but Zippy supposes, perversely, that it’s on the board at the comic-strip diner, with a typo in it

Three things here: about the (actual) diner and its appearance in an earlier Zippy strip, with the same drawing but different text in Zippy’s speech balloons; about (actual) Monte Cristo sandwiches and Nesselrode pie; and about the name Monty Crisco.

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Posted in Books, Diners, Language and food, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics | 1 Comment »

The best bits of me

January 8, 2024

A 2022 strip from the webcomic dinos & comics, an exchange between two dinosaurs who, in other strips, profess their love for one another. (The creators of the comic have gone to some trouble not to gender these two dinosaurs; Blu is blue, Brn is reddish brown, but otherwise they’re identical in appearance.) Whatever their romantic status might be, they are certainly involved in a deep friendship with one another; in this strip, Brn reports one of the great satisfactions of deep friendship: in the company of your friend, you feel that you’re the best person you can be:


(#1) dinos & comics — on its website, described as “a comic about depressed dinosaurs who find hope in each other” — came to an end a little while back, and has been succeeded by a new series, dinosaur couch, in which the title makes clear the theme of therapy and counseling in the comics.

Still other themes: the search for human connection and for meaning in a meaningless world. All of this sounds earnest, and possibly helpful to your mental health, but it fails to capture the charm, wry insights, frequently self-mocking  tone, and occasional downright silliness of these comics.

Meanwhile, the visual style is minimalist.

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

Today’s food punmanteau

January 5, 2024

(Today has been difficult, so this is the best I can do in the way of posting — opening up a topic for further postings, soon to come.)

It starts with this memic shoeshi image I encountered today on Facebook, passed on through various friends and acquaintances, as these things are. A truly wonderful composition:


The memic shoeshi; shoeshi here is a punmanteau: a pun and a portmanteau

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Posted in Art, Clothing, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Puns, Shoes | Leave a Comment »

Seaman Apprentice Crunch

January 4, 2024

From the annals of cartoon understanding, today’s (Wayno / Piraro) Bizarro strip, which is incomprehensible if you don’t know a crucial piece of American popular culture (and Wayno’s title, “The Early Years”, won’t be much help to you):


(#1) Someday Seaman Apprentice Crunch will command his own ship, and then he’ll be Captain Crunch, familiarly known as Cap’n Crunch, and he’ll give that name to a sweet breakfast cereal that American kids have been enjoying for 60 years (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

Note that Crunch is drinking from an 8-ounce milk carton (while his naval companion is having a beer).

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Posted in Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

The 7th day of Christmas

December 31, 2023

That would be today, December 31st, New Year’s Eve. (The 12 days then go on to January 5th, Twelfth Night, Epiphany Eve.) Back on the 4th day, December 28th, my mail brought me a digital-art celebration of the 1st day. (For a change, not from the hands of digital artist Vadim Temkin, who’s off in Colombia, the gem of South America, being an absolutely adorable Santa Claus, but from another of my digital-artist friends.) For the occasion, a partridge of sorts in a pear tree of sorts, and — in the tradition of VT’s holiday compositions for me — starring a fabulously hot object of gay sexual desire.


(#1) For the record, what catches me in the bot boy (call him Primo, the first of the season): in order, his sweet smile, then his nicely furred torso, and then the crotch tease contrived by the artist

All three components — Primo; the plump beakbird; and the golden hanging fruits — have that air of hyper-reality that I find especially desirable in digital compositions; not trompe-l’oeil, but a kind of magic realism.

The pears aren’t actually metallically shiny, but they tend that way. The partridge is even odder: round and full, like the grey, or English, partridge, but with the eyes and beak of an auk, a parrot, a gull. For comparison:


(#2) The grey partridge, Perdix perdix, a plump gamebird in the pheasant family; note the beak (photo: Cornell eBird files)

Is the partridge in #1, perhaps, a New Zealand flightless partridge that has managed to perch precariously in the pear tree? Some sort of aukridge? (I have inquired of the artist, but they haven’t risen to the bait.)

Bunny and Bear run through the 12 days. Meanwhile, as I struggled with a mounting stream of material to post that people have been sending me — I might never get out from under — friends were re-posting Liz Climo’s charming cartoon versions of the Twelve Days of Christmas, all done by her characters Bunny and Bear. (On these cartoons, see my 12/12/22 posting “Two Liz Climo cartoons”.) For the 1st day, and then today, the 7th:

(#3)

(#4)

 

Posted in Art, Holidays, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Music | Leave a Comment »

The internatal days

December 29, 2023

My coinage (using the medical adjective internatal ‘between births’) for the period between the birth of Jesus (conventionally celebrated on December 25th) and the birth of the Gregorian-calendar New Year (January 1st). There’s no standard term in English for this period, though Twixmas (not recognized in any lexicography-based dictionary) has been used in some commercial settings, apparently to refer to a new shopping season; it seems to be commonly limited to December 27th – 30th (excluding Boxing Day).

Now, in the New Yorker‘s January 1 & 8, 2024, issue, cartoonist Emily Flake has contributed a graphic essay entitled “Tips for Filling the Dead Week Between Christmas and New Year’s”, in which she falls back on referring to this often aimless period as a dead week, a week out of ordinary life. Her suggestions largely embrace this deadness, in its various forms. Meanwhile, if you look at the media’s preoccupations this week, you’ll been inclined to think of it as the days of retrospection, since the media are much taken with reviews of the news events of the year that’s winding down, memorials to the notable people who died during the year, and catalogues of the Best of the Year in many categories (books, movies, tv shows, songs, whatever).

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Posted in Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Names | 1 Comment »

Two formula comics

December 15, 2023

⬅️ 🚘 Nishi Day, 12/15, the day when I traditionally set off driving west from Columbus OH to Palo Alto CA for the winter quarter; and the day before 🎂 🎉 the December Birthfest (celebrating Ludwig Beethoven, born 1770; Jane Austen, born 1775; and my excellent friend Ned Deily, born 1952)

In today’s Comics Kingdom feed, two strips that turn on formulas, but of two very different kinds. First, a Rhymes With Orange that illustrates a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau), a joke form that manages to combines two strikingly unrelated elements whose names happen to overlap — in this case a postmortem medical procedure (called an autopsy) and a confused, disordered state (referred to as topsy-turvy). And then, a Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon, yet another of their forays into the Psychiatrist cartoon meme, set in a psychiatrist’s office and involving a patient on an analytic couch plus a therapist, in an adjacent chair, taking notes on the session; the patient or the therapist or both are astonishing characters, and the setting allows for all manner of jokes to be worked into their encounter — in this case, an everything-bagel patient and a baker therapist, confronting the patient’s anxiety at wanting more (Wayno’s title: “Too Much is Never Enough”).

But now, to the toons!

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Posted in Comic conventions, Jokes, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »

I’ll take Manhattan

December 13, 2023

An Ellis Rosen pun cartoon (which came by me on Facebook this morning) in which ER manages to treat Manhattan, the name of the island that’s one of the boroughs of New York City, as a pun on Manhattan, the name of the cocktail (made with whiskey, sweet vermouth, and bitters). This is a signal achievement in joke puns, managed by exploiting Godzilla / Gojira, from the Japanese movies, a radioactive prehistoric reptilian monster with a ravenous appetite for urban infrastructure, especially city buildings and large vehicles:


The cartoon, situated in a world of reptilian monsters (a world that’s a translation from our everyday world of restaurant dining); as a bonus, in an inset, the cartoonist’s thumbnail sketch of himself

On his Instagram page, ER says he’s re-posted this old cartoon of his because of the new Godzilla movie.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Puns, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Country names and food

December 11, 2023

Country names, take me home
To the place at the table where I belong

(with apologies to John Denver and his collaborators)

This posting is, first of all, about bare-bones pun jokes, typically a one-line set-up followed by the pun in a pay-off line.

In this case, on a theme (food and eating), with the puns all from a domain (of country names); the classic pun name on this theme from this domain is Hungary (punning on hungry). I will illustrate with three Hungary-based bare-bones jokes.

Then, name-domain + theme puns (in this case, country + food puns) can be arranged in a cascade, which can be performed by a single joke-teller or framed as repartee between two performers. The classic country + food cascade is triggered by Hungary (Greece, Turkey, and Chile are other possible triggers); I’ll call it the Hungary For Food Riff, HFR for short. HFR comes in many variants; here I give two repartee versions: one relayed to me by Probal Dasgupta on Facebook on 12/9, the other I found in net collections of puns on Hungary later that day.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Formulaic language, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Names, Puns, Routines and rituals | 1 Comment »

Placebo Domingo

December 10, 2023

Not a mangled tenor, but the Sunday (12/10) Doonesbury strip, back to savaging the dietary supplements Prevagen and Balance of Nature as expensive placebos:


(#1) Both companies advertise relentlessly on MSNBC (my background source of news and commentary), so causing me to swear a lot at my television set

These days the ads seem only to have engaging older people reporting their subjective feelings — of improved memory (Prevagen) or improved energy and well-being (Balance of Nature). No more rat studies. Just placebo effects down the line.

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Posted in Language and medicine, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

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