Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category

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The Marquis de Sad

July 29, 2023

(Innocent posting until I get to Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, a section that is absolutely not for kids or the sexually modest. I’ll issue a warning when it’s coming up.)

Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, a Psychiatrist cartoon with, on the couch, a Marquis de Sade who no longer can no longer find pleasure in blasphemy and cruelty:


(#1) Yes, a terrible pun, with sad for the model Sade (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page)

Note that the therapist matches the Marquis in period costume, including a wig and the use of a quill pen for taking his notes.

Now, the backstory (about the actual Marquis de Sade and his writings) and the afterstory (the movie Pasolini made out of 120 Days of Sodom.

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Posted in Books, Comic conventions, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Puns | 2 Comments »

The flightless kite

July 27, 2023

It’s definitely Penguin Day on AZBlog — following on my earlier “Illusory penguins ” posting — with this wonderful wordless Jared Nangle cartoon in the new New Yorker,  for 7/31:


(#1) The kite inherits its flightlessness from its subject; bird kites and butterfly kites can fly, but not penguin kites (meanwhile, a kite that could dive and swim like a fish would certainly be a disappointment)

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Posted in Cartoonists, Linguistics in the comics, Penguins | Leave a Comment »

Zerbina and Zippy sling trochaic tetrameter

July 26, 2023

In today’s Zippy strip, Zerbina and Zippy indulge their onomatomania — a love of certain expressions that leads the affected person to chant them over and over for pleasure — by slinging competing (trochaic tetrameter) product names at one another competitively, before falling passionately into one another’s arms:

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Poetic form, Word attraction | 1 Comment »

To the Sea!

July 18, 2023

The title of Peter de Sève’s lemming cover art for the 7/24/23 New Yorker issue, which I reproduce here for its delightful playfulness:


These are of course the lemmings of the pop-cultural imagination, bearing only a distant relationship to actual lemmings

In fact, these sportive lemmings are only a stand-in for the beach-goers of July.

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Posted in Art, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture | Leave a Comment »

Nanabots

July 17, 2023

Today’s whimsical Wayno / Piraro Bizarro:

(if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

A complex bit of wordplay here, which involves a chain of nouns — nanotechnology, nano, and nanobot — and then the combination of the nouns nana ‘granny’ and robot the way nano and robot are combined in nanobot. So: nanabot ‘granny robot, robot granny’. The nanabots in the cartoon are doing culturally conventional things for solicitous grandmothers: baking cookies, inviting the kid to visit, knitting a scarf, giving the kid some money for candy.

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Posted in Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »

The Mummy’s Cursor

July 16, 2023

A preposterous pun — with a long history behind it — for today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro:


(#1) Model mummy’s curse  / pun mummy’s cursor (cursor  ‘a movable indicator on a computer screen identifying the point that will be affected by input from the user, for example showing where typed text will be inserted’ (NOAD)) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 12 in this strip! — see this Page)

Now the backstory:

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Movies, Pop culture, Puns | Leave a Comment »

The beefheart / bee fart chronicles

July 15, 2023

An old Zits strip — Jeremy twitting his father affectionately over Walt’s musical tastes — that’s been hanging around on my desktop for some years. This will take us far afield, thanks to the activities of the performer Don Van Vliet, best known by his stage name Captain Beefheart.


(#1) The relatively easy part of this has to do with the phonology of connected speech, which in casual speech has the compound noun beefheart / beef heart /bif.hart/ ‘the internal organ, the heart, of a bovine animal raised for its meat’ (also the name of, very roughly, a rock music performer) resyllabified and reduced to /bi.fart/ — so becoming homophonous with a novel compound bee fart / beefart; amusement ensues

The reduction without the resyllabification yields yet a third compound noun, beef art, also attested with reference to artworks featuring either bovine animals (in, say, pastoral — bucolic — scenes) or their meat (especially in still lifes, but also in performance art pieces involving raw meat).

I will now abandon this third compound in this posting. And also various imaginative uses for bee fart. I have pretty much all I can handle today with beefheart and Captain Beefheart.

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Posted in Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Music | Leave a Comment »

Comes in /perz/

July 5, 2023

A very much not-dead-yet posting to hold this space while I cope with an avalanche of posting material, plus my suddenly much improved medical condition (which is totally exhilarating). In any case, an old One Big Happy cartoon (originally from 9/4/14) in which Ruthie asks her defiantly working-class neighbor James to name something that comes in pairs, but James hears the homophone pears (both nouns pronounced /perz/ in my variety of English) and just can’t get shift his perspective:


Note James’s multiply non-standard negative existential construction in his ain’t no shoes

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Posted in Ambiguity, Dialects, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Negation, Phallicity, Signs and symbols, Syntax | Leave a Comment »

Two OBHs

June 29, 2023

I’m at home, recovering very erratically, with many setbacks and fresh issues. Yesterday I narrowly avoided being sent back to the emergency room at SUMC. This is all very difficult — and incredibly tiring. I don’t feel up to going over medical issues right now, but I have a big backlog of draft postings that were ready to go out on June 16th, when everything fell apart, so that I will diverge from SUMC moments to write up some of these for you.

First up, two vaguely related One Big Happy strips that appeared a while ago in my comics feeds: what I’ll call “Naked Lady” and “Define HAT”:


(#1) “Naked Lady”: on the artist’s intentions vs. the viewer’s perceptions of a work


(#2) “Define HAT”: on essence and appearance

(more…)

Posted in Art, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Philosophy | Leave a Comment »

Aardvarkman on the Impostor Syndrome cartoon

June 15, 2023

About a Jules Feiffer cartoon — still not unearthed (and it’s possible that there’s more than one) — that I recollect one way (described in yesterday’s posting “The Impostor Syndrome cartoon”) but cartoonist Dave Sim (creator of Cerebus the Aardvark) recollects a different way, in a review of Feiffer’s 1993 book The Man in The Ceiling, as quoted on the A Moment of Cerebus blog (“an unofficial cite celebrating the comics art of Dave Sim & Gerhard”) in 2015.

In today’s installment, the Sim account. And then a brisk survey of  Sim, the strip Cerebus, and the character Cerebus (and yes, there will be an explanation of the name).

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Posted in Ambiguity, Cartoonists, Jokes, Language and animals, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | 1 Comment »

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