Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm:
Mistaken anemone for mistaken identity. Phonologically distant, but interpretable because mistaken identity is an idiom, a formulaic expression, which is, moreover, appropriate to the context of the cartoon.
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
Anemone pun
July 1, 2014Ruthie verbs away
July 1, 2014A recent One Big Happy:
Ruthie is verbing names of locations: shed, porch. Granting that she’s a cartoon character, we can nevertheless speculate that she’d heard the verb shed and connected it to the familiar noun shed. Then porch by analogy.
Ridiculous analysis
June 27, 2014This morning’s Bizarro:
A ridiculous analysis of tendinitis as ten ’10’ + a mystery element -dinitis (presumably referring to some medical condition), which would then allow for the greater (and graver) eleven ‘ll’ as the first element — a morphological analysis and extension you might expect from a clever child, but scarcely from a physician.
A doctor would recognize tendinitis as tendon (the body part) + the inflammation suffix -itis. (tendIn rather than tendOn reflects fine points of Latin morphophonemics).
[Added: On Google+, Tim Evanson reminds me, indirectly, that Nigel Tufnel is the lead guitarist in the rock band Spinal Tap, as in the mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap.]
Rules of conversation
June 26, 2014Yesterday’s Zits, with Jeremy’s parents getting instruction on how to speak to his friends when they visit:
Grice’s Maxim of Quantity, in two parts:
Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).
Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
(Discussion on this blog here.)
The crucial point, of course, is what Jeremy thinks is required in such exchanges.
Ruthie roundup
June 24, 2014Today’s One Big Happy provides a sort of compendium of Ruthie’s missteps in English:
I think my favorite is panel 3: not a flight of fancy, but a duck on a park bench.
Charles Barsotti
June 22, 2014In the NYT yesterday, an obituary by William Yardley: “Charles Barsotti, Cartoonist With Humor Both Simple and Absurd, Dies at 80”.
Charles Barsotti, a cartoonist for The New Yorker whose jaded canines, outlaw snails and obtuse monarchs made readers laugh for more than 40 years, died on Monday at his home in Kansas City, Mo.
… Mr. Barsotti made pasta talk. He drew hot dogs planning cookouts. His lines were spare and clean, whether drawn or written
That last sentence makes reference to two of my favorite Barsotti cartoons, both of which happen to have a foodstuff talking on the phone; both have appeared on this blog.
Streamlined Koons
June 21, 2014
Title or slogan?
June 20, 2014The Bizarro of 3/20/14, which I seem to have missed when it came up in March, but caught yesterday reproduced in the July issue of Funny Times:
An ambiguity — Miss France as a (NP) title in a beauty pageant vs. Miss France as a VP remnant of a declarative S, conveying ‘I miss France’. This gross difference in syntax and semantics corresponds to a pragmatic difference, whether the expression is viewed as printed on a sash (as in beauty pageants) or as the equivalent of a t-shirt slogan — very different sociocultural contexts.
More on the emoticon watch
June 20, 2014In the wake of rage against emoticons, Beckettian bafflement from cartoonist Benjamin Schwartz in the latest (June 23rd) New Yorker:
More octothorpe wrangling
June 20, 2014In the previous round, this Mother Goose and Grimm (#4 here) on pound sign, hashtag, etc. And now a Zits on the subject, with a family argument, lined up by generation:
