Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category

Piñatarians, proselytizing

May 26, 2023

Very much a Mary, Queen of Scots, not dead yet posting — but in fact a wildly celebratory one. Explanations after the main event, in which eccentrically costumed (but neatly attired) enthusiastic young men have appeared at the front door to push their niche religious beliefs on the resident (who views them dubiously):


(#1) Offering the (good) word / the (good) news to the heathen — feel free to imagine the emphatic pronunciations that are often represented by initial caps on Good, Word, and News — in a goofy cross of dead-serious LDS evangelism and the jokey belief system of the Pastafarians (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

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Don’t ask! 2

May 25, 2023

A Peanuts strip, featuring Charlie Brown and Peppermint Patty:


(#1) But wait! Patty’s Don’t ask! is not a request for Charlie not to ask about her feelings (which would directly contradict her requesting Charlie to ask about her feelings); instead, it’s an exclamation (in Yiddish English) conveying Patty’s dismay at feeling really crappy

We have been through this use of Don’t ask! previously on this blog, in the aptly named posting of 1/31/21, “Don’t ask!”:

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Raisin d’Ȇtre

May 23, 2023

Today’s Bizarro continues the Wayno / Piraro explorations of outrageous puns:


(#1) The title raisin d’être is an extraordinary pun on the French nominal raison d’être (literally ‘reason for being’), but with English raisin [ˈrezn] ‘dried grape’ in the place of French raison [ˌreˈzɔ̃] ‘reason’ (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

English [ˈrezn] ‘dried grape’ and French [ˌreˈzɔ̃] ‘reason’ share the initial segmental phonology [rez], but otherwise are phonetically quite distant (aside from being in two different languages) — utterly different prosody (accent + accentless vs. secondary accent + primary accent), with final syllables that share only an element of nasality (syllabic nasal consonant, nasalized vowel).

The basis of the pun, from NOAD:

noun raison d’être: the most important reason or purpose for someone or something’s existence: an institution whose raison d’être is public service broadcasting. ORIGIN French, literally ‘reason for being’.

What makes the pun so — forgive me — delicious is the fact that French raisin does not mean ‘dried grape’ but in fact  ‘grape’; a raisin in French is a raisin sec (literally ‘dry grape’). French raisin d’être would presumably mean something like ‘grape of being’.

Earlier from Bizarro in the outrageous pun genre, from my 5/21 posting “It’s endive!”: alive [ǝˈlajv] in It’s alive! vs. endive [ˈɛnˌdajv] in the pun, sharing the final segmental material [ajv], but utterly different prosodically (accentless + accented vs. primary accent + secondary accent) and in their initial segmental material ([ǝl] vs. [ɛnd]).

But phonetically very imperfect puns can succeed as jokes if their basis is a well-known formula: a quotation (as in It’s endive!), an idiom (as in raison d’être), whatever.

Street Life

May 21, 2023

A just-installed photo gallery on the wall above the desk in the study of my condo. An addition to the visual density of the place, providing enjoyment for me, but also intended to absorb and please friends and visitors (I am a deeply sociable person, and I like to entertain, in several senses.)

About Street Life. A display of six sex-tinged (but not actually X-rated) photos of men on the street (from Samson McGee, who maintains a gigantic library of malesex photos for sale), each with a fortune from a fortune cookie. I have given them titles and ordered them below in a kind of natural progression; here with the fortunes:

— Soon Paid Off: street hustler, iconic and tough; All of your hard work will soon be paid off.

— Performance over Speed: street hustler, not at all toughened up yet; People forget how fast you did a job — but they remember how well you did it.

— Time Not Money: two sailors, possibly cruising, maybe even hustling; A friend asks only for your time and not money.

— Offer Affection and a Sea-going Hard-On: two sailors strolling, one with a hard-on; Love is being offered to you, be affectionate in return!

— Offer Affection and an Unbuttoned Hard-On: two guys talking on the street, one with a hard-on and his fly open; [once again] Love is being offered to you, be affectionate in return!

— Fish Sticks and Moose Knuckles: two guys talking on the street  in front of a shop selling fish sticks (one sporting a tremendous moose-knuckle); Every wise man started out by asking many questions.

Once again, I would like to give you a photo of the display, but I have to wait until I can get someone to take a picture for me.

The visual density of my environment. First there are the books — in the big main room, the study, and the bedroom. Mostly a deeply random collection of things saved from the dispersal of my 40,000-volume professional library, though there are some coherent subcollections. But possibly worth scanning: I doubt that there’s anyone else in the world with this collection of titles, so you might find some surprises.

Then on almost every remaining horizontal surface, collections of objects — remarkable, pretty, funny, sexy, artfully made, full of affectionate associations. Gay symbols, penguins, mammoths, phallic symbols. In the heavily X-rated bedroom, representations of dicks, simulacra of dicks, creatures with bodyparts in the shape of dicks, and so on.

And on almost every available vertical surface, artworks, cartoons, collages, Zwicky images, postcards (men, animals, food, whatever), and photographs, both family photographs  and hot guys. In the heavily X-rated bedroom, a huge assortment of my XXX-rated homoerotic comic collages.

Much here to amuse the eye and engage the mind. Come visit sometime.

 

 

It’s endive!

May 21, 2023

Today’s  Mary, Queen of Scots, not-dead-yet cartoon (I’m alive!): today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro:


(#1) The two ingredients of this preposterous pun: It’s alive! and endive (punning on alive)

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How do you throw a poetry slam?

May 18, 2023

That is the question posed by today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro:


(#1) Dan and Wayno commit the (imperfect, but very close) pun Crime Scheme > Rhyme Scheme (/krajm/ > /rajm/, just lose the /k/) — the crime in question being a novel variety of match fixing (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

I’ve been musing on how you would throw a poetry slam — knowingly offering an inferior rap, I guess, though that sounds like a hard thing to pull off.

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Name that picture

May 17, 2023

A little follow-up to the Bizarro cartoon in yesterday’s posting “16 will get you 3”: suppose you were given just Wayno’s central drawing in that cartoon, with the challenge of giving it a name:

Well, there it is, the whole joke in a wordless image, which could stand alone as a puzzle, without any of the framing in the Bizarro version.

You, the viewer, would then have to discover Darth waders.

16 will get you 3

May 16, 2023

In my comics feed for today, May 16th, three excellent strips: a Zits on learning how to use a computer (and coping with explanations for how to use it from the deeply tech-embedded, like the 17-year-old Jeremy Duncan in this strip); a Rhymes With Orange with a truly bizarre way for spelling your name when ordering drinks at the neighborhood cafe; and a Bizarro with a high-groan pun.

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Collectible porcupine boot scraper

May 10, 2023

Today’s Zippy strip has Griffy carried to ecstatic chanting of  a line of dactylic trimeter in celebration of a quirky gift from Zippy:

This is a return to a Zippy theme, but also my cautious return to posting on this blog, after some days in hell that I’ve been describing on my Facebook page; my last posting here was “Iddle-Do and Not Zarella”, back on 5/5/23, five days ago. Aside from some calamitous physical symptoms, I suddenly developed a very specific cognitive deficit: though still able to read and send e-mail, I lost all knowledge of how to post to WordPress.

With the help of friends, these abilities have been coming back in bits and pieces over the last two days. But I’m now able to edit text, insert images and add clickable links (see above). Not trying anything very ambitious, just getting my feet back in the water.

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Iddle-Do and Not Zarella

May 5, 2023

As a temporary diversion from some truly awful times in my life (which I will eventually post about), two reprised One Big Happy strips recently in my comics feed, in which Ruthie struggles to interpret language unfamiliar to her.

The strips.


(#1) The Iddle-Do Rule; which should lead us to reflect some on the distinction between circumstances in which “good enough for some purpose” — it’ll do — is the appropriate goal (the general case for most aspects of everyday social life) and the special cases in which a perfect performance is called for


(#2) Not Zarella cheese (with Not Zoball soup as a bonus); I note that Zarella is a fairly common Italian surname, which Ruthie (who is of Italian descent) might well be familiar with, so that  a cheese named after a Zarella wouldn’t be at all surprising

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