Something I’ve been up to: a proposal for a summer internship in linguistics for this summer, on Linguistics in the Comics. (more…)
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
Summer in the comics?
March 8, 2012Lunar matters
March 8, 2012Yesterday’s Scenes From a Multiverse:
Two things here: the X in the moon figure; and the burlesque of “That’s Amore”.
Trannysaurus
March 8, 2012Today’s Bizarro:
A portmanteau of Tyrannosaurus (the dinosaur fixture of popular culture) and tranny, slang for a transgender person or a cross-dresser. So: T. rex as a drag queen.
Tranny is often perceived as derogatory, but it’s been reclaimed in many contexts — for instance, in the name of the San Francisco drag club Trannyshack. Trannyshack webpage here, Wikipedia entry here:
Trannyshack is a monthly drag club taking place at DNA Lounge in San Francisco. It was started by drag queen Heklina in 1996 as an offshoot of Klubstitute, and was a weekly fixture at The Stud bar in San Francisco for 12 years, drawing large crowds on a regular basis. The Tuesday night performances at The Stud ended on 12 August 2008, with Trannyshack resuming as a monthly event at DNA Lounge in March 2010.
(The Stud goes on. Both The Stud and DNA Lounge are in the SOMA (South of Market) district of the city — on 9th and 11th Sts., respectively.)
A fixture of S.F. gay life.
persons
March 7, 2012Yesterday’s Scenes from a Multiverse:
Personhood for fetuses, personhood for corporations, personhood for every damn thing!
And on bears…
March 6, 2012Following on my twink posting, a bear comic:
This is a take-off on Bill Keane’s The Family Circus cartoon, adapted for gay men by reference to bears. (Plus a use of the X magnet snowclonelet.)
A gesture towards bear-twink equity.
(Hat tip to Chris Ambidge.)
Reanalysis and reinterpretation
March 6, 2012Two items this morning in which lexical items are understood in new ways: look down reanalyzed as V + Prt rather than V + P; and circadian in circadian rhythm understood as an ethnonym, denoting some group of people, the Circadians.
Zippy names
March 5, 2012
The pin-pen merger
March 5, 2012
lady-wave
March 2, 2012The Thursday Zits cartoon has Jeremy using the wrong greeting gesture for the context (where a fist bump would be appropriate, matching Jorge’s offered fist bump):
Here we get the N + V compound V to lady-wave, which appears to be an invention; at least I can find no evidence of it on the net. But what does it mean? Something like ‘wave like a lady, wave the way a woman does’? Or like ‘wave as one does to a woman (rather than to a man)’? Either makes sense in the context, and either would be mortifying to Jeremy. The first has a possible model in the attested to queen-wave ‘to wave like the Queen’, while the second has no obvious model I can think of — but either is a possible innovation.
Maybe the cartoonists had one sense in mind, but the question is how the characters would understand the expression and how the readers of the strip do. Maybe we should just be satisfied saying that Jeremy messed the greeting up.
motion, movement, move
February 27, 2012Today’s Bizarro:
Consider for a moment how the nouns motion, movement, and move are used, and your head will soon hurt; look at the entries and cites in the OED, and things will get even worse. Each of the nouns has its own mini-syntax, occurring in specific idioms and collocations, many of them restricted to specific contexts: make a motion (in court), make a motion (towards doing something), make a movement/move on (someone), a legal motion, a dance movement, a bowel movement, a chess move, etc.