Two cartoons from the New Yorker issue of 12/15/25: Michael Maslin with a phrasal overlap portmanteau tribute to the state of Vermont (land of covered casseroles, for covered-dish socials, and rustic covered bridges); and Roz Chast, showing us Santa’s alarmed helpers when he can’t resist falling — once again — for clickbait.
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
A Vermont portmanteau and a net-naive Santa
December 16, 2025Dancing Santas
December 10, 2025From Bob Eckstein’s The Bob substack on 1/7/23, this delightful troupe of dancing Santas, created for the monthly comedy newspaper the Funny Times to sell on t-shirts (this year’s offer came to me by e-mail yesterday:
(bob’s text) Funny Times is getting into the Holiday groove with my Dancing Santas. The perfect Secret Santa gift can be found here.
Z-Man and his cornucopia of words
December 7, 2025Today’s Zippy strip shows us Bill Griffth’s superhero character Z-Man, the Pinhead Superman. Like Zippy, Z-Man is an onomatomane, luxuriating in a constant warm shower of remarkable words. Like Superman, Z-Man has magic eyes: Superman has X-ray vision, Z-Man can beam information though his eyes. If you have abiblia, or fear that you will contract it — if you’re abibliophobic — Z-Man ‘s gaze can send you all the words you need.
From axolotl to doo-hickey, Z-Man has a word for you
(As a Z-person, I am of course partial to a Z-Man superhero. He flies for me.)
It’s the polar bears
December 6, 2025A Glen Baxter cartoon in the latest — 12/8/25 — issue of the New Yorker:
The scheduled event will go on, complete with umbrella to shelter the picnickers from the blazing sun, even in the snow; even when polar bears arrive (attracted by the smell of food) to steal bites of avocado toast, the way jays and gulls do in the summer
It’s a feature of local life (on the SF peninsula) that temperatures drop about this time of year to chilly nights and daytime highs hovering around 60, while some guys — I am one — persist in going about in short pants (low today 47, high 59, I am in rainbow flag gym shorts), but with a warm shirt (fleece-lined flannel if necessary); I do not, however, picnic in this weather.
And we are unafflicted by polar bears. Chipmunks, roof rats, squirrels, ground squirrels, jays, crows, gulls, hawks, owls, raccoons, skunks, the occasional lynx, every once in a while a mountain lion, but even the tantalizing scent of Safeway’s jambalaya heated up in my microwave has failed to lure polar bears south from Alaska to Palo Alto. But then we are woefully lacking in ice floes and meaty seals.
Cartoon understanding: the advanced class
December 5, 2025Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro is an advanced exercise in cartoon understanding: a wordless strip (no speech, no caption) in which a tuxedoed performer takes a bow, next to a toy piano:
Ah, he seems to be a pianist, and the tiny piano, no more than a foot long, must be his instrument; at that point, you are baffled — unless you’re familiar with a classic walk-into-bar joke (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there’s only 1 in this strip — see this Page)
In this variant of the classic joke, that piano is in fact 12 inches long, a 12-inch piano, so the performer is a 12-inch pianist. This is the status conferred on him by a genie when he wished for a 12-inch penis. Whoops.
Penguin games
November 28, 2025Briefly noted. In the latest New Yorker issue (of 12/1/25), cartoonist Meredith Southland suggests a solution to the puzzle of what penguins are doing when they waddle around waving their wings in the air:
(#1) They are playing Charades! Well, life on the ice floes of Antarctic imagination offers few interesting diversions, but this communal game can occupy plenty of dark cold time
The all-time favorite penguin game, however, is Hide and Seek, a spheniscid take-off on Where’s Waldo? Sometimes known as Lost in the Crowd. Though ice-sliding and egg-rolling races are both tremendously popular. Never a dull South Polar moment.
A seasonal affliction
November 26, 2025As soon as the sun rose on November 1st — All Saints Day — the Christmas music began. All of it, including the two monumentally maddening hammer-stroke repetitive songs “The Twelve Days of Christmas” and “The Little Drummer Boy”. My first thought for a remedy — a bullet to the brain to everyone who plays either song in public (everyone is welcome to play them behind closed doors, with effective acoustic insulation in place, of course; I am not an uncivilized monster) — turns out to be not only illegal, but also immoral; no matter what the provocation, aesthetic violence, especially of the fatal variety, apparently offends the sensibilities of our society.
So I propose a different remedy: removing miscreants from the public sphere, cordoning them off where their songs can no longer disrupt people of good will, while meting out a punishment that truly fits the crime. Not aesthetic execution, but aesthetic imprisonment:
A Mick Stevens cartoon, from the 8/17/81 issue of the New Yorker
The egg crack’d from side to side
November 21, 2025
(#1) Alfred Tennyson,”The Lady of Shalott” (1832)
A Joe Dator cartoon in the latest (11/24/25) print issue of the New Yorker poses the question, “What if Humpty Dumpty had survived his fall?”
Humpty Dumpty is an egg. An egg contains a developing chicken embryo. The embryo will eventually mature, crack through the egg, and emerge as a chick. (There is even theme music for this scenario, Mussorgsky’s “Ballad of the Unhatched Chicks / the Chicks in their Shells”, from “Pictures at an Exhibition”.)
JD shows the first moment of emergence, the chick’s head bursting through the chest of a dismayed Humpty Dumpty, who is toppling backwards in his chair — a scene that will be viscerally painful for modern audiences familiar with the 1979 movie Alien, with its famously grotesque Chestbuster scene, but will in any case evoke a fatal heart attack :
(#2) Humpty Dumpty and his female companion at table, when the mortal wound opens up; it will crack him from side to side
Taking Goat to lunch
November 15, 2025Today’s Pearls Before Swine, in which Rat lives up to his name:
The crucial point: take you to lunch in the context of birthday greetings to Goat — in this context, clearly an instance of the phrasal idiom I’ll label take someone to (‘host someone at (an event), treat someone to (an event)’), and so understood by Goat (and, I think, by all readers of this strip); but then, in a kind of lexicographic bait and switch, Rat maintains that he meant only the caused-motion verb take (‘convey something to (an event at) some place’) and takes no responsibility for paying for the occasion
Then, in an appendix to this main discussion, I expose my bafflement at the treatment of the phrasal idiom take someone to in dictionaries: I can’t find one that lists it (while treat someone to is well covered).
The balloon trainee
November 12, 2025Yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro shows us a budding balloon artist at the very beginning of his career, where he creates the simplest of balloon animals, before advancing to the balloon dog:
(#1) The raw material of balloon sculpture is cylindrical balloons, which can then be twisted and tied together; this trainee has the cylindrical balloons, but as yet has had no practice in manipulating them, so he offers for sale the unprocessed balloons, which the buyer just has to imagine as different roughly cylindrical animals — here an earthworm, here a snake, here (where we break up in laughter) a lowly nematode (most nematodes are tiny, less than 2.5 mm long) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
