Today’s Zippy, with a quiz:
Five of them. How many can you identify?
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
The icon hunt
July 31, 2011fantastication
July 31, 2011
Sunday Punnies #16
July 25, 2011Another Bizarro installment of puns:
On carpal tunnel, cell phone, and Toy Story, with the second really working only in spelling rather than speech.
We are everywhere
July 25, 2011A Zippy with a plaint of minorities of many sorts:
They stare at us. But we are everywhere.
Name chains
July 25, 2011
Inexplicated
July 22, 2011A Zippy with the surprising verb inexplicate (in the past tense):
We start with the adjectives perplexing and inexplicable. Perplexing is based on the verb perplex. What, then, is the verb that inexplicable is based on? Obviously, inexplicate, the meaning of which is hard to, um, explicate.
(The semantics of perplexing and inexplicable are, of course, quite different, and the in- of inexplicable is a negative prefix associated with the adjective explicable rather than with the verb explicate. But Bill Griffith understood that.)
Saul Steinberg on activity and stativity
July 22, 2011On a postcard I got recently, a reproduction of this drawing by Saul Steinberg (used as a New Yorker cover in 1971):
The prototypical activity verb do (with agentive subjects) and two stative verbs (with non-agentive subjects), relational have and predicating be, with their (usual) semantics represented in visual images.
I’ll say a bit more about activity and stativity. But first, some words about Saul Steinberg.
Awesomeness
July 21, 2011
Weaseling and wheedling
July 19, 2011
Prefix foolishness
July 19, 2011Cartoon #2 for today: a Bizarro:
Recutting (or metanalysis — see here) at work, with the pro of provolone and the anti of antipasto treated as derivational prefixes. Historically, the provol- part of provolone represents provola, a type of Italian cheese (made with cow or buffalo milk), and the anti- part of antipasto is ante- ‘before’.