Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
May 21, 2026
The crucial moment of today’s (5/21) Zippy strip, in which Griffy addresses a Muffler Man, offering the fiberglass giant a phallic offering to his superior masculinity. It’s hard to know where to start with this — and then it turns out that this strip is a reworking of the text from an earlier strip on a similar theme.
(#1) Today’s strip “Tired Out”, with, oh dear, the alpha male theme made explicit; it is, in any case, all about (hyper)masculinity vs. inferior masculinity
(#2) The 6/2/17 strip “Rubber Fire”, showing (hyper)masculine contempt for analytic academics (I am, of course, the very model of the modern analytic academic, so eat my shorts, brute boy)
Just to get the two strips on display, for discussion to come. My l life has been overfull, but almost entirely in wonderful ways, and that’s something else for me to talk about.
Posted in Academic life, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, My life, Phallicity, Pop culture, Signs and symbols, Vaginality | Leave a Comment »
May 14, 2026
Briefly noted: today’s Zippy strip has our Pinhead rowing to a half-rhyme:
Zippy is keen on spleen (‘bad temper; spite’ (NOAD)) and is happy to vent his in a half-rhyme. In particular, the feature rhyme of /strim/ with /splin/, m – n being the most common feature rhyme for consonants in English. On a lake, he could have displayed his hate (k – t).
Posted in Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Rhyme | Leave a Comment »
May 2, 2026
In this cartoon from the latest (5/4/26) New Yorker, Ms. Duck and Ms. Rabbit mourn their versatile paramour, Mr. Shimmer the duck-rabbit (or rabbit-duck); see my 8/24/25 posting “Shimmer is both a floor wax AND a dessert topping”, and reflect on versatile gay men, who are bottoms or tops, depending on how you approach them:
(#1) The widows weep for their bi-stable beloved; meanwhile, the famous illusion that lies at the very center of their world turns out to be a lifelong preoccupation of the cartoonist
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Posted in Ambiguity, Cartoonists, Death and dying, Illusions, Language and animals, Language and religion, Linguistics in the comics, Parody, Perception, Work | Leave a Comment »
April 25, 2026
Yesterday’s (4/24) Zippy strip has our Pinhead singing the praises of everyday stationery supplies, in particular the cylinders (now usually made of plastic) used to convey rolled-up sheets of material with printing or designs on them: the telescoping plastic mailing tube:
Zippy chants for the TPMT
Four words of decreasing length (in number of syllables), in two phrases:
— the adjectival modifiers telescoping ‘which telescopes’ and plastic ‘which is made of plastic’ (4 + 2 syllables)
— and the head compound noun mailing tube ‘tube for mailing things’ (2 + 1 syllable)
Thereby achieving the effect of building to a final one-syllable bang.
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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Poetic form, Repetition | Leave a Comment »
April 18, 2026
Yesterday’s (4./17) Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon shows two snowmen conferring:
Left Snowman reassures Right Snowman that the frozen confection that they are eating in a cone (“fruit-flavored crushed ice” (NOAD)) is not in fact snow — that would smack of, ick, cannibalism — but instead sno, a substance that merely resembles snow (Wayno’s title for the cartoon is Faux Cone); it’s just a sno cone / sno-cone (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
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Posted in Ambiguity, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Semantics, Semantics of compounds | 2 Comments »
April 15, 2026
In today’s (Wayno / Piraro) Bizarro, a bank teller focuses on how quaint it is that a bank robber has written his demand on paper (the way they did it in old movies), while disregarding the pressing threat of the robber’s gun:
(1) A quibbling triumph of details of form over the real threat of content (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
Faced with dreadful, uncontrollable situations, people sometimes take to fretting about some minor issue that is more easily remedied.
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Posted in Form and function, Humor, Linguistics in the comics, Mistakes, Movies and tv, Peeving | Leave a Comment »
April 2, 2026
In the spirit of the Passover season, a Frank Cotham cartoon in the 4/6/26 issue of the New Yorker:
A gentle jab at the stereotypical Jewish inclination to public disputation, alluding to the saying two Jews, three opinions or three Jews, four opinions
Even Moses, parting the waters of the sea (to enable the Israelites to escape the Egyptians pursuing them) was not immune from second guessing, at least in Cotham’s telling (though the event somehow escaped recording in the Pentateuch).
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Posted in Language and religion, Linguistics in the comics, Slogans | Leave a Comment »
March 28, 2026
From the latest New Yorker issue, of 3/30/26, this cartoon by Daniel Kanhai:
The energetic angelic figure of Moses, with his rather dubious angelic assistant (his brother Aaron? his successor Joshua? just an angel off some random cloud, pressed involuntarily into the frog toss?), lobs jumbo frogs down onto the Egyptians, meting out punishment to them for their Pharaoh’s offenses against the Lord and the Lord’s chosen people, the Israelites
It’s the Biblical second Plague of Egypt — not the disastrous swarming frogs of the book of Exodus, overwhelming entire cities, doomed to die in great stinking heaps; but instead adorable, perky frogs from children’s books and the cartoons (surely they are a pretty green). Moses gets them by the barrel.
In any case, the incongruity of the appalling — literally Godawful — frogs from Exodus and the cute frogs in the New Yorker made me laugh out loud.
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Posted in Humor, Language and animals, Language and religion, Linguistics in the comics, Understanding comics | 3 Comments »
