Today’s Pearls Before Swine:
Once agan, Pig falls foul of the Comic Book Censor. This time, it’s over the expression flip s.o. the bird, understood literally (as Pig intends) or as a reference to a rude gesture, giving someone the finger (which comes up here every so often).
Another topic arising from the Stanford comics seminar, again from a proposal for a student paper (which I won’t cite here because the topic might change and in any case is still the student’s work, though I might cite it later with the student’s permission).
The topic is metatext, outside the text of the comic itself and in Elizabeth Traugott’s phrasing in e-mail, serving to “frame the way to read the text”.
At least six types: captions, titles, inserts, mouseovers, accompanying text, and footnotes. I haven’t discussed any of these systematically, but they’ve all come up in my postings on the comics. Some notes.
Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm:
You say flamenco, I say flamingo. Amazingly, these words turn out to share a history.
From the Funny Times Cartoon Playground (with reader-generated cartoons), this one by contributor cta:
In keeping with some other recent cartoon postings, consider this as an exercise: what sociocultural knowledge do you need to understand this cartoon (imagine you’re explaining it to a Martian or a child)? What makes it funny?
From bookseller Ann Burlingham, a link to this parody comic:
Pulp fiction with hot books.
Today’s Bizarro has yet another version of the Comma Joke, repeated in many places over the years:
The contrast is between expressions that are tightly connected syntactically to the rest of their syntax (as in Kiss the cook) vs. those that are loose adjuncts of one type or another — vocatives or, as in this case, appositives.
(Note: this was originally posted under the heading Apostrophe Time. My mental gears slipped between apostrophe and comma, as several readers have pointed out. Some days I’m not very sharp.)
Found via the net, this cartoon:
Inflectional morphology and (somewhat absurdly) social context.
Today’s Zippy, which incorporates the comic-within-the-comic, Fletcher and Tanya:
F&T is a recurrent feature in Zippy. It’s a masterpiece of (Gricean) irrelevance, in which the conversational partners flagrantly talk past one another. What each of them says is grammatical English, though often peculiar in content. But the exchanges don’t cohere at all.
(Not much linguistic here. But I was seriously tickled by this Dinosaur Comics. It seems to be cartoon appreciation day.)
But there is a linguistic, or at least epistemological, issue here, having to do with the persistence of identity over time. The Arnold Zwicky I am now is very different from the Arnold Zwicky of 1962 or 1946, say. But there’s a historical chain that connects us.
Doctor Who, on the other hand, is a title (and role) that is reassigned periodically to fresh people. That is in fact similar to the Pope (and the President of the United States, and many other cases).
