Today’s Scenes From a Multiverse:
Aside from the allusion to a version of the Turing Test, there’s the verb to drone-marry, a play on the back-formed verb to gay-marry (here).
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
Drone-marry
December 20, 2011Recognition
December 14, 2011A Shannon Wheeler penguin cartoon:
(Hat tip to Michael Palmer.) If you’re not a penguin, “they all look alike”. The cartoon’s conceit is that this is true even if you’re a penguin.
Bad language school
December 1, 2011Today’s Rhymes With Orange:
Effluency, a portmanteau of effluent and fluency, is a nice touch (NOAD2 on effluent: ‘liquid waste or sewage discharched into a river or the sea’) — a genuinely dirty word. Oh, @*#☆! indeed.
Respecting beliefs
November 29, 2011Today’s Scenes from a Multiverse:
The strip is about “respecting beliefs”, but here I’m picking on the amoral cockgoblin slur.
The end of books, or maybe grammar
November 26, 2011Today’s Zippy:
Three things: the prediction of the end of the book (endless symposia, publications, etc. on the future of the book, and how it probably doesn’t have one), software developers as authorities on such matters, and the faults of language peevers (much commented on over the years on Language Log).
Bizarro POP
November 26, 2011Today’s Bizarro:
A classic POP — phrasal overlap portmanteau — building on clown college, college football, and football widow.
Cartoon technical talk composite modifier pile-up example
November 25, 2011Today’s Zits:
Pierce indulges in a pile-up of modifiers in the composite expression personal reference respite environments. These pile-ups are characteristic of newspaper headlines (especially in British papers) and other contexts where brevity is valued, like signage, but they also have a home in officialese, business jargon, and other types of “technical talk”, where they function as much to convey seriousness as to save space (in this case, incorporating the jargonish respite, environment, personal, and reference).
Despite his appearance, Pierce might have a future in an office environment.
Product satire
November 24, 2011
Allentown riff
November 22, 2011Today’s Zippy has our Pinhead riffing on Billy Joel’s song “Allentown”:
Another contribution to the Zippy song-burlesque oeuvre, following on “Somewhere Over My Poncho” (“Somewhere Over the Rainbow”), “My Funny Serpentine” (“My Funny Valentine”), and “Everything Works Out for Me” (“Everything Happens to Me”). This one diverges pretty far from the original, but the model is unmistakable from the first line.