Linguistics in the comics | Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category

diddly squat

October 3, 2011

Today’s Bizarro:

The construction in You (don’t) know diddly / squat / diddly-squat (about NP) has in fact caught the attention of linguists. In a Language Log posting on swearing a while back, I referred to

the analysis of NPs like (doodly) squat, (jack)shit, and fuck(-all) in sentences like You (don’t) know jackshit about linguistics — by, among others, Larry Horn (“Flaubert triggers, squatitive negation, and other quirks of grammar”, in the 2001 volume Perspectives on Negation and Polarity Items, edited by Hoeksema et al.) and Paul Postal (“The structure of one type of American English vulgar minimizer”, chapter 5 in his 2004 collection Skeptical Linguistic Essays).

Fascinating things, those vulgar minimizers.

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Taboo language and slurs | 3 Comments »

Frontier Scrabble

September 30, 2011

From the October 3rd New Yorker, this cartoon by John Klossner:

A peek into the little-known world of hard-core Scrabble in the Old West.

Posted in Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Silliness | Leave a Comment »

The velocitized Toad

September 30, 2011

Today’s Zippy, with a speeded-up Mr. (the) Toad:

Velocitize isn’t a Bill Griffith innovation, but it hasn’t been around for a very long time.

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Posted in Derivation, Innovations, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

Comma chameleons

September 29, 2011

Found via social media, this poster, apparently from the blog Epic Ponyz:

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Posted in Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Puns | 1 Comment »

More Zippy burlesque

September 26, 2011

Today’s Zippy has Mr. Toad back on the musical burlesque trail:

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Posted in Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Music | 2 Comments »

My funny serpentine

September 23, 2011

Today’s Zippy, doing damage to Rodgers and Hart’s “My funny Valentine”:

These burlesques tend to superimpose themselves on the originals, making them hard to recall accurately, as I noted last year when Zippy featured “Somewhere, over my poncho”. So here, as a service to my readers, are the original words:

My funny Valentine
Sweet comic Valentine
You make me smile with my heart
Your looks are laughable, unphotographable
Yet you’re my favorite work of art

Is your figure less than Greek?
Is your mouth a little weak?
When you open it to speak, are you smart?

But don’t change a hair for me
Not if you care for me
Stay little Valentine, stay
Each day is Valentine’s Day

Oh my: “When it opens, does it reek of Swiss chard?”

Zippy strips also burlesque poetry — for instance, an assortment of poets slammed here (“I calibrate my elf”!) and Ginsberg’s Howl riffed on here.

Posted in Language play, Linguistics in the comics | 3 Comments »

Venn diagramming for nerds

September 17, 2011

Ben Zimmer’s recent Word Routes column on Visual Thesaurus, “Word-Lore, Nerd-Lore”, returns to the question of the origin of nerd (a topic Ben looked at a little while ago in a Boston Globe column, “Birth of the Nerd”, quoted on this blog here) and links to this entertaining Venn diagram:

Note that all four of the terms in this diagram — dweeb, nerd, geek, and dork — are of obscure etymology. This is a semantic domain where people are likely to just make words up.

Posted in Etymology, Language and society, Linguistics in the comics | 2 Comments »

The news for penises

September 14, 2011

Episode 20 of Monty Python’s Flying Circus includes segments of television news as reported for special audiences: The News for Parrots, The News for Gibbons, and The News for Wombats (the parrot segment also has A Tale of Two Cities “specially adapted for parrots”). Here at AZBlog, penis-related material has been piling up for months, so now it’s time for The News for Penises, in five chapters. (I exclude material on gay porn and my XXX-rated collages, though these are penis-heavy, because I report on these regularly on my XBlog.)

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Posted in Art/lit/music/film, Compounds, Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Metonymy, Taboo language and slurs | 2 Comments »