From Charlie Doyle on ADS-L, this F Minus cartoon (by Tony Carrillo):
Doggy-dog made it into the Eggcorn Database back in 2005, here.
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
Eggcorn cartoon
March 7, 2011Two Dingburg memes
March 7, 2011Well, spreading usages:
The discourse marker so in sentence-initial position has been around for a long time and seems to have been frequent for about a hundred years (discussion by Mark Liberman here).
The pronunciation ek cetera has also been around for some time. Webster’s New World Guide to Pronunciation complained about it in 1984 (and many have complained about it since then), but the pronunciation surely goes back long before then; I have recollections of hearing it from friends in the early 1960s, but unfortunately such memories are unreliable. (MWDEU in 1989 provides an explanation for it.)
Here’s a Zippy about it from 11/23/06:
Nucular comes up in Zippy cartoons every so often.
Scapegoats
February 23, 2011From Facebook friends Dennis Lewis and Jess Anderson, this poignant editorial cartoon by Mike Luckovich:
This not long after Jeff Shaumeyer provided a link to an appalling scapegoat story in the Central Telegraph (of Australia):
Actual vs. virtual
February 20, 2011Two recent Zippys in which Zippy confronts changing times, in particular the passing of books and newspapers as actual objects (though now welcoming virtual objects, while Zerbina defends the tactile experience), and coping with handheld devices (like the vacuum cleaner!):
Now, of course, iPads, Kindles, etc. are actual objects, indeed objects you hold in your hand. But they are also virtual devices, reproducing the appearance of other actual objects, hence one degree removed from “reality”. Yet physical books and newspapers are themselves one degree away from the reality of speech (a fact that a long time ago, as literacy spread, bothered many critics), in the way that recordings of musical performances are one degree away from the reality of the performances and photographs of works of art are one degree away from the works themselves.
Maybe it’s too much to read into Zippy, but he can be seen as welcoming (after a long period of resistance and nostalgia for the old ways, chronicled in postings on this blog) new media of expression and means of action as having their own virtues.
Dingburg portmanteau
February 18, 2011She’s mostly not plugged in, but there’s one video game that suits her:
This is Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead cartoon, so of course the violent vehicular combat game Carmageddon, with its portmanteau name (compare carchitecture, here), is real, not some fevered fiction of Griffith’s: first released in 1997, now in a series of three, with overall sales of around two million.
Chinese Abbott and Costello
February 18, 2011Passed on by Victor Mair, a version of “Who’s on first” (editorial cartoon by Robert Arial):
Compare Mair’s assemblage of puns on yuan on Language Log, here.
The far reaches of analogy
February 11, 2011Today’s Bizarro:
Turnabout — rather grisly in this case — is fair play, with huming created on analogy with snowing, using the pairing of human with snowman. (For me, that would give huing rather than huming; but Piraro seems to have treated human as if it were hume-man.)
But human and snowman aren’t really parallel, historically, morphologically, or prosodically, though some people have come to treat the second syllable of human as if it were the noun man — giving rise to a jocular or hyper-serious counterpart huwoman, and a “gender-neutral” substitute huperson.
[Historically, human is based on Latin homo ‘person, human being’, as in Homo sapiens; the m belongs to the stem, not to a formative man. The word has an unaccented final syllable — compare pagan and veteran — while compounds with second element man (like snowman) generally have this element bearing an accent, though a weaker accent than the first element. The accentual facts are, however, complex, because some compounds in -man have lost the accent on the second element — seaman and chairman, for example — and others have variable accent on the second element
Annals of smileys
February 4, 2011Today’s Bizarro, with a Hitler smiley:
A portmanteau crop
February 4, 2011Three portmanteau items from recent e-mail and web explorations: from meteorology, from a site featuring X-rated male photography, and in a Rhymes With Orange cartoon.
Fast food portmanteaus
January 30, 2011Don Piraro takes on the portmanteaus of Micky D’s:
