Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category

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They do not act that way

March 6, 2023

From my comics backlog, a One Big Happy strip that turns on the distinction (in the philosophy of language) between descriptive statements (about what is)  and normative statements (about what should be) and shows Ruthie and Joe’s mother exploiting normative statements for her own parental ends — using one to convey injunction or prohibition: saying that this should be the case implicating that you should — or must — act to make it so.


Oh yes, there’s also the third-person reference to her addressees, framing an injunction on them specifically as a kind of normative universal — a manipulation of address terms that the kids simply fail to comprehend (in the last two panels of the strip)

Joe and Ruthie are in fact tearing through the grocery story like wild animals. Ellen Lombard, their mother, asserts that her children do not act like that, meaning this statement normatively. Conveying, in fact, that not only should her children not act like that, but that they must stop acting like that.

Posted in Address terms, Implicature, Linguistics in the comics, Speech acts | Leave a Comment »

An exchange of childish ritual taunts

March 5, 2023

Of the form

V1 ya, wouldn’t wanna / shouldn’t hafta V2 ya (where V1 and V2 rhyme)

In a One Big Happy strip from the backlog on my desktop:


(#1) Ruthie and the tough neighborhood kid James trade taunts, until Ruthie’s mother drags her away from the encounter

This is a competitive performance of verbal skills, designed to insult without wounding. James’s first move is a pre-existing model, and then they go on from there.

(more…)

Posted in Gender and sexuality, Insults, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Routines and rituals | 1 Comment »

Why not oneteen, twoteen?

March 3, 2023

(Or, for that matter, why not onety-one, onety-two?)

These are questions that kids acquiring English frequently ask, as Ruthie does in this One Big Happy strip:


(#1) Kids are pattern-seeking organisms, and when confronted with a deviation from a pattern, are inclined either to silently, unconsciously, eliminate the deviation in favor of the pattern; or to explicitly lodge a complaint, as Ruthie does here

Ruthie asks a why-question, and there is an answer to it — a complex, fascinating answer supplied briefly for the general reader by Arika Okrent in several places (see below) — but it’s of no use to Ruthie, because that answer is about the history of English, while she wants to know what sense it makes for English to work this way now, and why don’t we fix it.

Alas for Ruthie, the only fair answer to her question is that English just is as it is, and it doesn’t really make sense. Bite the bullet, kid.

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Posted in Child language, Linguistics in the comics, Numbers | 6 Comments »

Egg-themed Scrabble

March 1, 2023

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit for the first of March; meanwhile, it’s St. David’s Day, and here comes Taffy with the leeks (from which many excellent soups can be made) and the daffodils (strictly for admiring; they are poisonous)!

Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, with an egg-themed Scrabble game, providing an excuse for the pun Scrabbled eggs, based on scrambled eggs:


(#1) Six ways of referring to eggs (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)

At this point, I discovered that there’s a Scrabble cartoon meme, with huge numbers of cartoons using the word / board game as the setting for a variety of jokes.

Also that though Scrabble has been mentioned many times on this blog, I’d never posted anything about the game. So I’ll start with that.

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Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Toys and games | Leave a Comment »

Ruthie meets the challenge of the unfamiliar

February 24, 2023

It’s an old theme on this blog: 6-year-old Ruthie in the comic strip One Big Happy as a constantly entertaining source of efforts to cope with unfamiliar words and larger expressions by assimilating them, in one way or another, to things that are familiar to her. Some examples surveyed in my 2/3/19 posting “Ruthian lexical items in real life”; and then, yesterday, in the posting “Ruthie goes for the donuts”, she understands windchill as Winchell’s (donuts): the unfamiliar element is the technical meteorological term windchill. and Ruthie copes with it by replacing it with a phonologically similar item that’s familiar to her (she’s fond of Winchell’s donuts):

(#1) unfamiliar windchill / familiar Winchell’s

Over the past three years or so, I’ve been accumulating One Big Happy strips in this vein and am now disgorging six of them: a similarity case, in which Ruthie copes with unfamiliar material by treating it as phonologically similar familiar material (as with windchill / Winchell’s); two ambiguity cases, in which unfamiliar material is homophonous with familiar material, so she has to cope with her mistaken interpretation of what she hears; and three more complex cases (one involving portmanteaus, one involving orthographic abbreviations, and one involving Ruthie’s own analogical creation — Ruthie is indeed ingenious).

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Posted in Abbreviation, Ambiguity, Language and animals, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Puns, Style and register | Leave a Comment »

Ruthie goes for the donuts

February 23, 2023

In my comics feed today, a One Big Happy originally from 1/6/03 (20 years ago, and that turns out to be important) in which Ruthie eggcorns the weatherman’s technical term windchill (factor) to Winchell’s (the name of a chain donut shop), which is more familiar to her — but not perhaps to most readers of the strip, even in 2003, when there were a lot more Winchell’s shops around than there are now. But the strip:


(#1) windchill / wind-chill / wind chill is a N + N compound meaning roughly ‘chill caused by wind’, but is in fact a technical term in metereology (and its connection to chill and wind might not be clear to someone who in passing hears tv reports mentioning the factor)

Especially the connection to wind, since pronunciations of wind chill in ordinary connected speech lack a [d].

(more…)

Posted in Eggcorns, Holidays, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Phonetics, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »

More from the Cavewoman Culture Club

February 22, 2023

The CCC — last seen in action in my 2/18 posting “A Neanderthal breakthrough”, in which an inventor cavewoman carves the first definite article out of stone — strikes again in the Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange cartoon of 5/21/21, in which a cavewoman devises a precursor of the candlelit dinner:


(#1) An announcement in Caveman Talk of the first romantic dinner for two; since these beginnings, it has evolved into a elaborated cultural practice

Cultural innovations often come with bold experiments in form at the outset (consider the history of photography and film) — in this case, apparently, in the adventure of scented fire.

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Posted in Books, Comic conventions, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Smell, Style and register | Leave a Comment »

Far Side Neanderthals

February 19, 2023

Following on yesterday’s posting “A Neanderthal breakthrough”, on a Rhymes With Orange cartoon about the cavewoman who invented the definite article (plus Caveman cartoons from Bizarro and Scott Hilburn), I recalled a Gary Larson Far Side cartoon that I’d been saving since 2021, a cartoon in which Cro-Magnons are viewed as step up from Neanderthals:


(#1) Dining at the Restaurant La Cave, back in the days when Neanderthals shared Europe with the upstart Cro-Magnons

Larson produced a huge number of Neanderthal cartoons in the 15 years of The Far Side, 6 more of which I’ll reproduce below. They’re all set in Caveman locales, with characters that are Cavemen in appearance and dress but otherwise are engaged in social relationships and cultural practices from late 20th-century America — in #1, the two men are vying for the attentions of a woman, the old-fashioned Neanderthal (rubbing sticks together to make fire) pitted against the slick new Cro-Magnon (using a cigarette lighter).

#1 is complex in its handling of the dual nature of its characters, who are simultaneously cavepeople and modern Americans. The larger setting is in a cave (with a cave painting of a deer on the wall), but, more specifically, two of the characters are sitting at a table at a little restaurant while the third brandishes that cigarette lighter.

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Posted in Comic conventions, Evolution, Language and animals, Language and food, Libfixes, Linguistics in the comics | 2 Comments »

A Neanderthal breakthrough

February 18, 2023

A great moment in fictive human history, captured in a 5/2/21 Rhymes With Orange cartoon:


(#1) Caveman quiz great inventor cavewoman, she make definite article

Well, yes, Hilary Price has her doing it in English, a specific language, which has to stand in for Human Language, because we have no way of representing text in Human Language.  And Price has her doing it in English orthography (rather than speech), because this is a cartoon (not an address) and the presentation has to be visual. And, stunningly, Price has her doing it as a sculpture, a piece of 3-dimensional artwork, rather than by making marks on some surface — possibly because women are the creators of beautiful useful things, aesthetically satisfying everyday objects. (Beyond that, Price has her cavewoman  explicitly viewing her work as potentially world-changing — an ambition usually associated, these days anyway, with males.)

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Posted in Comic conventions, Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Origins of language, Style and register | Leave a Comment »

Today’s exercise in cartoon understanding

February 17, 2023

Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro — Wayno’s groan-punning title: “Tuffet Luck” — depends on your knowing one thing from popular culture in the Anglosphere (of, roughly, the past 200 years). If you don’t know that, you’re SOOL; the spider, curds, whey, and tuffet are just weird stuff.


(#1) The spider as ambulatory assault victim; apparently, the spider’s prey was not frightened away, but instead used what they’d learned in self-defense classes (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are (only) 2 in this strip — see this Page.)

Yes, it’s a nursery rhyme. “Little Miss Muffet”, said to have been first recorded in 1805. Traditionally, part of growing up for most children in the Anglosphere (though I wonder if that’s still true), but probably little known elsewhere. And largely opaque to the children who chant it, though I suspect that modern kids are inclined to interpret it as a tale of a male imposing himself on female, and her fleeing from him. Kids would probably understand it as a boy annoying or grossing out a girl with creepy-crawlie things. Older people will think of unwanted advances on the subway, Tyrone F. Horneigh pursuing Gladys Ormphby on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, and the like.

The Bizarro version, on the other hand, is much more up-to-date: Muffet Fights Back.  Muffet, in fact, Kicks Ass.

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Posted in Figurative language, Folklore, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Poetry, Puns, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

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