A recent Dinosaur Comics takes up poetic form (and English derivational morphology):
T-Rex is puzzling over sonnets, and (in the mouseover) marveling about the word sonneteer.
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
sonneteer
February 5, 2012Cartoon 4: Guy advice
January 31, 2012One last cartoon for today: today’s Zits, on man talk:
Well, it works as coaching on golf. And maybe as sex counseling. But on coping with, say, car problems?
Cartoon 3: Snowman up!
January 31, 2012
Cartoon 2: Homonym Vampire
January 31, 2012
Cartoon 1: What kills people
January 31, 2012A big crop of cartoons today. The first is from Horne & Comeau’s A Softer World (information on the webcomic here), under the title “Education”:
(Hat tip to Paul Armstrong.)
The cartoon combines the NRA bumper-sticker slogan “Guns don’t kill people, people do” (or “… people kill people”) with Pope Benedict’s recent pronouncement (on January 9th) on same-sex marriage:
Pope Benedict said … that gay marriage was one of several threats to the traditional family that undermined “the future of humanity itself.”
Yes, the news from Rome: same-sex marriage will kill the human race.
The NRA slogan has been much played on, on t-shirts, posters, bumper stickers, and the like; just google on {“guns don’t kill people”}. A small sampling of continuations of “Guns don’t kill people”:
… I kill people
… Bullets do. Guns just get the bullets going really fast.
… Liberals against conceal-carry laws kill people.
… well, this one may [image of gun with muzzle reversed, pointing at the shooter]
… Chuck Norris does [Norris is a prominent NRA supporter]
… People with mustaches kill people
… Cupcakes with mustaches kill people!
… Whacked on meth-head kittens do. [image of kitten aiming gun]
… Dick Cheney kills people [allusion to Cheney’s hunting accident]
… Zombies do.
… Black people kill people. [image of Samuel L. Jackson with a gun]
… Dangerous minorities do!
… OJ kills people
… But they can sure speed up the process. It can take an hour to choke a bitch.
… Cats do. [image of cat with a gun]
… Gaping holes in vital organs do.
… Husbands that come home early do.
… Crazy motherfuckers kill people
… Supervillains kill people
… Drug cartels armed by our government kill people.
… Dads with pretty daughters kill people.
… Drivers with cell phones do
… The government does.
… “Pro-lifers” with guns kill people
… Vincent Price does
… rappers do
… Little fairies throw the bullets
… Ninjas do
… Kids who play videogames kill people.
… lolcats kill people. [yet another armed cat]
(and then more distant variations, like: “Dogs don’t kill people. Stupid owners with stupid breeds kill people.”)
Etymology-Man
January 30, 2012In xkcd‘s telling, E-Man swoops in to battle the Etymological Fallacy and speak on behalf of common usage:
(If the cartoon displays as multicolored trash — this is some WordPress glitch — click on the image to see it properly.)
Wordless cartoons, words-only cartoons
January 28, 2012In the latest (January 30th) New Yorker, this cartoon by Sam Gross:
Completely wordless — but how much cultural knowledge it takes to understand it! You need to know about doggie/doggy doors (or dog doors, as they’re usually called in the trade), balloon animals, helium, and clowns.
At the other end of the scale there are words-only cartoons, like this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal number (opposing social pleasures and stranded prepositions) posted by Mark Liberman a couple years ago:
Cartoons usually have both a picture and a caption (or speech bubbles), but there are limiting cases in both directions: pure sight gags and slogans presented as cartoons, for example.
Queer comics
January 26, 2012Now playing at the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum (655 Mission St.), under the auspices of the California College of the Arts, a show (which opened December 17th) on queer comics — a combination of two of my interests. The poster:
A bunch of condescending pedants
January 26, 2012Via Tim McDaniel, this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:
(Maybe I should create a new postings category Stereotypes of Linguists.)
The professor believes that all pedants are condescending, so that condescending pedant is a redundant, pleonastic, phrase. But quite likely the student intends condescending to be a appositive rather than intersective modifier (see the pilotless drone discussion here) — reinforcing the component of condescension in pedant, rather than narrowing the reference of the noun. From the pilotless drone posting:
You might think that even the appositive reading of “pilotless drones” would be stupid, since drones are all pilotless. But look at the explicitly appositive version: “drones, which are pilotless”. This isn’t stupid at all; it REMINDS us, in a helpful way, that drones are pilotless. In general, even when the denotation of Adj is included within the denotation of N, appositive Adj N can do useful discourse work. As a bonus, since intersective Adj N is stupid in this situation, the potential ambiguity is eliminated in practice, in favor of the appositive reading.
(Of course, labeling condescending pedant as a redundancy is itself condescending pedantry, so the professor’s last sentence has the flavor, if not the actual form, of self-referentiality.)
abdominable
January 24, 2012First came this story from the Onion (11/2/05):
Yeti Releases Abdominable Crunch Workout Video
That’s the complex portmanteau abdominable: abdominal (as in abdominal muscles) + abominable (as in Abominable Snowman, a.k.a. Yeti).