Yesterday’s Zippy:
I admire Phyliss’s “without th’ DVR, we’d be talking to the avocados” — the potential crisis in the produce aisle. I can see talk to the avocados as a new expression for ‘go bonkers’; at the moment, it gets no ghits.
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
Taste in film
May 19, 2012More quiffs
May 14, 2012From Judith Thurman’s profile of cartoonist Alison Bechdel in the New Yorker:
The most prominent piece of art on her studio walls is a gigantic poster of Tintin, who looks a twin of [Bechdel’s character] Mo. so I presumed that he had inspired Bechdel’s avatar. “I can see it,” she said, though it wasn’t conscious. “Mo is me, not Tintin.”
The certainly share their quiffs.
Gag cartoons
May 12, 2012
Alison Bechdel
May 10, 2012On the occasion of Alison Bechdel‘s latest graphic novel, Are You My Mother? (a memoir of her life with her mother), it’s time to celebrate the artist. The book has been reviewed twice in the New York Times (and, of course, many other places), and Judith Thurman did a wonderful profile of Bechdel in the April 23rd New Yorker.
Branding Shakespeare
May 9, 2012Yesterday’s Scenes From a Multiverse, “A Message From Our Sponsors“, with Shakespearean brands:
Jon Rosenberg’s comment:
If product placement had been as popular in yesterday’s fiction as it is in today’s, what would it look like? Maybe a little like this. Maybe there would be more ads for hog jowls and wagon wheels. I’m not an expert, you know.
The allusions are to real products: Lysol disinfecting wipes, Ginsu knives (as seen on tv), Murphy’s oil soap, and McDonald’s meals (indicated by the Golden Arches symbol). Plus the mangled quotes from the Bard.
(The lines from Midsummer Night’s Dream — “Gentles, do not reprehend: / If you pardon we will mend” — are especially nice: comprehensible, but packed with syntactic features no longer found in current English.)
Swine Lake and Sendak
May 8, 2012
xkcd back-formation
May 7, 2012A G&S takeoff by Randall Munroe:
In the midst of this:
A BA in communications guarantees that you’ll achieve
A little less than if you’d learned to underwater basket-weave
with the verb underwater basket-weave, backformed from the synthetic compound underwater basket-weaving.
flaming
May 3, 2012
Puntoon for the weekend
April 29, 2012Yesterday’s Bizarro:
Snowman is an island entire of itself; each snowman
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a snowball be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as a manor of thy friends or of thine
own were; snowman’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in snowfall.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the snow melts; it melts for thee.
A Zitsmanteau
April 25, 2012Today’s Zits, in which Jeremy commits a portmanteau:
Several of the strips I follow regularly are given to portmanteaus — Rhymes With Orange and Bizarro, in particular — but that’s not usually Zits‘s territory. Here, Jeremy intends messay as a smog-type portmanteau (something that is both X and Y), while his mother interprets it as a telescoping portmanteau (as messy essay).