Today’s Zippy:
Zippy undergoes the information revolution (liking, linking, sharing, downloading, YouTubing, web surfing, texting, and video conferencing) … in his head, which is suffering from the demands of electronic life.
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
Electronic life
January 15, 2012More Zippy bop
January 11, 2012In today’s Zippy, Dingburgers continue to pursue their beatnik ways:
oo-bop-de-bootie!! Or maybe Oo-Bop-Sh’Bam!
Zippy bops
January 9, 2012Today’s Zippy:has the denizens of Dingburg’s Beatnik District bopping on the bongos:
Shades of Mr. Zopittybop-Bop-Bop (here)!
More play on nonsense syllables — bebop, rebop, plain bop, oobity, doo-wop, etc. — from various musical genres: R&B in Lionel Hampton’s “Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop” (1946), “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” from Walt Disney’s Cinderella (1950), rockabilly in Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-A-Lula” (1956), the Beatles’ “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” (1968), Afro-beat/punk/rock in Who Shot Jonson’s “Oobity Bap” (2009). And more, much more.
Rin Tin …
January 4, 2012Today’s Bizarro, with a canine portmanteau:
That’s Rin Tin Tin, the great movie dog, plus Tintin, the boy hero of the comics (and now the movies), who goes on his adventures with his dog Snowy. (In the cartoon, the dog has the body of Rin Tin Tin and the head of Tintin, so there’s a visual portmanteau to go along with the verbal one.)
Scientor
January 4, 2012Yesterday’s Scenes From a Multiverse:
Not Science Wizards, but Science Bastards. Hosted, of course, by a mad scientist.
My Favorite Things
January 1, 2012Today’s Zippy, with a riff on “My Favorite Things”:
That’s the show tune from the 1959 Rogers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music. Great music (wonderfully transformed in John Coltrane’s soprano saxophone version of 1961), supremely annoying lyrics.
Irreducible complexity
December 29, 2011Today’s Scenes From a Multiverse:
This is the William Paley argument from irreducible complexity — complexity cannot arise without the intervention of a creator — confronted at some length by Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker, where he uses the example of the mammalian eye to show how complexity can evolve.
Then there’s language. How could such a complex system evolve? The literature on the subject is gigantic, but pretty much everyone argues that the complexity evolved from something simpler, a view opposed to creation stories in many traditions.
In the Biblical tradition, for instance, there’s the Adamic language, spoken by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden: the language used by God to address Adam, the language used by Eve to address the Serpent, the language used by Adam in naming the creatures created by God. This was either given by God or invented by Adam, and there’s some tradition for saying it was Hebrew. But there was just one, and it first appeared in all its complexity — though the notion of complexity involved here is not very impressive, because of the tendency to see a language as just a big bag of words (like a big pile of monkeys).
The night before Christmas
December 24, 2011Today’s Rhymes With Orange:
Not a creature was stirring,
Not even a mouse
And from later in the poem (by Clement Clarke Moore or Henry Livingston), with Undergear’s holiday greetings (in a flaming-red jockstrap):
Meanwhile, Flamingo Nativity: the holy parents and their flamingos await the appearance of the holy infant (photo from Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky):
Dinosaur snowclone
December 22, 2011Today’s Dinosaur Comics, in which Ryan North riffs on snowclones and Language Log (the all-caps speaker from above is God, or some equivalent authority, by the way):
The Dingburg Daily Dose
December 21, 2011Today’s Zippy, about giving people what they want:
The Funny Times is sort of what the Dingburgers have in mind, but it combines cartoons with humorous writing, all culled from a variety of publications. Rarely subtle.
And aren’t we already seeing Popeye and Mandrake the Magician in contention for the U.S. presidency?