Today’s Zippy:
Mainly about Facebook and face time, but there’s other stuff in there too.
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
face compounds
February 25, 2012The end of The New Y
February 24, 2012In the February 27th New Yorker, this Mick Stevens cartoon:
The snowclone X Is The New Y (The New Y for short) is the snowclone to bury all snowclones (some discussion here, though the material on it is now overwhelming). In Stevens’s cartoon we come to the end of the line: no more “75 is the new 65” or whatever.
(I can’t help noting that The New Y is the new Eskimo Snow, where Eskimo Snow is the ur-snowclone, about Eskimos and their putatively many words for snow. Not that Eskimo Snow is going gently away; Victor Steinbok has been sending me — and Geoff Pullum and Mark Liberman — fresh examples or meta-examples every few days.)
Clash of the facemen
February 24, 2012Yesterday’s coverage of the last debate between candidates for Republican nominee for President of the United States focused on exchanges between Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney. One photo here:
I was struck (once again) by the physical similarity between the two men (and their contrast to Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul). They’re both facemen, as some of us say in our slangy way: conventionally very good-looking men.
Nerf Vortex Nitron Blaster
February 24, 2012Today’s Zippy (like a number of other Zippy strips) revels in the sheer sound of an expression, in this case a brand name:
That’s Nerf Vortex Nitron Blaster, a line of trochaic tetrameter (with short first foot) — so satisfying to say over and over again, like a mantra.
Misfired indirection
February 22, 2012
Punnies #21
February 19, 2012Today’s Bizarro, with more puns:
The second pun turns on word division (compare ice cream vs. I scream), with the extra twist that the indefinite article a(n) is usually attached to the following word and pronounced as a unit with it — so than the [n] of an is usually syllabified with the following word, making an ice and a nice phonetically identical.
The third plays on the convention of using obscenicons to represent swearwords.
Of course, all three depend on cultural knowledge: among other things, that Brussels is in Belgium, that Brussels sprouts are a vegetable, that the man in the first panel is planting something, and that the scene and his costume suggest Belgium (what makes it preposterous is that he’s planting pig snouts); that the costumes and dwellings in the second panel are appropriate for Eskimos and that Eskimos live in cold, snowy climates; and that Men’s Wearhouse (itself a pun) is the name of a men’s clothing store.
I feel like sushi
February 19, 2012A recent Rhymes With Orange:
Among the many uses of the verb feel is is the one OED2 glosses as:
to feel like (doing something): to have an inclination for
with the usage note “(? orig. U.S.; now common)” and the usage label “colloq. or vulgar” (I wouldn’t say that vulgar is appropriate now, even if it was in 1989, but colloquial is about right). In the cartoon, this sense competes with a sense in which the subject of the verb is the source of a touch perception (with the experiencer of this perception optionally expressed by a PP in to). (more…)
Reductio on all sides
February 15, 2012Scenes from a Multiverse on the 9th:
Rosenberg’s comment:
Hello! Today’s fallacy is Reductio ad absurdum, which was invented by the Gauls on a Thursday about 2000 years ago.
How can I put this?
February 15, 2012A cartoon by William Haefeli that was rejected by the New Yorker:
(This is reproduced from Matthew Diffee’s The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in The New Yorker (2006).)
Courting the gay vote is a euphemism for engaging in, or soliciting, gay sex (of some kind, not specified, though receptive fellatio — sucking cock — is the most likely act). It falls into a pattern of ostentatiously playful euphemisms of the form Ving the N, especially for reference to male masturbation (my favorite is firing the Surgeon General); there’s a huge list of euphemisms for masturbation, many of them of this form, here; some discussion of display through concealment in these euphemisms here; and a note on the extension to the meta-euphemism verbing the noun here.
But it’s not just masturbation. In 2009 we got hiking the Appalachian trail for reference to adultery, thanks to Mark Sanford; see Ben Zimmer’s “Birth of a euphemism” posting here, with a link to Mark Peters’s more detailed posting.
Haefeli’s cartoon was done before the Appalachian trail was hiked, but it did come (perhaps presciently) during an eruption of “family values” anti-gay public figures involved in gay sex scandals. In chronological order, with brief Wikipedia accounts:
(1) Mark Foley: The Mark Foley scandal, which broke in late September 2006, centers on soliciting e-mails and sexually suggestive instant messages sent by Mark Foley, a Republican Congressman from Florida, to teenaged boys who had formerly served as congressional pages. (link)
(2) Ted Haggard: Ted Arthur Haggard … is an American evangelical pastor. Known as Pastor Ted to the congregation he served, he was the founder and former pastor of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado; a founder of the Association of Life-Giving Churches; and was leader of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) from 2003 until November 2006.
In November 2006, escort and masseur Mike Jones alleged that Haggard had paid him to engage in sex with him for three years and had also purchased and used crystal methamphetamine. (link)
(3) Larry Craig: The Larry Craig scandal was an incident that began on June 11, 2007, with the arrest of Larry Craig — who at the time was a Senator from Idaho — for lewd conduct in a men’s restroom at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. (link)
(4) Bob Allen: Bob Allen … is a former American politician who was a Republican member of the Florida House of Representatives from 2000 until 2007, representing Florida’s 32nd district…
He made headlines in 2007 after being arrested for offering $20 for the opportunity to perform fellatio on an undercover male police officer in the restroom of a public park and was released on bail. (link)
There’s more, but it certainly was a banner time for hypocrisy. Haefeli’s cartoon was done before the Craig and Allen scandals, but he might have been influenced by the Foley or Haggard affairs.
As far as I can tell, courting the gay vote hasn’t caught on as a euphemism for gay sex, or for soliciting gay sex, but it has some potential.
Hot comics
February 12, 2012In the latest Zippy, Dingburgers are going cuckoo for comic books:
This is Bill Griffith’s work, so of course none of the comic books are inventions.