Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category

Bizarro orientations

February 12, 2023

Two Bizarro cartoons from 2021, touching on questions of sexual orientation:


(#1) A Piraro Bizarro from 11/7/21: imperfect pun on sexual (orientation): sectional, as in sectional furniture ‘furniture made in sections’ — combined with a (perfect) pun on orientation ‘the relative physical position or direction of something’ (NOAD) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are, wow, 12 in this strip — see this Page.)

#1 raises the question of how labile sexual orientation might be: easily changed, like the arrangement of furniture in a room, just a matter of style, fashion, or whim; or more enduring and resistant to change.

 

(#2) A Wayno / Piraro Bizarro from 12/2/21:  a complex (but perfect) pun,  turning primarily on turn on ‘start, cause to operate’ vs. ‘arouse (sexually)’, but secondarily involving connection in both electrical and emotional senses (Dan Piraro says there are 5 of his symbols in this strip)

#2 is also a joke about visual pornography: the artwork depicts a 9v female connector, so it appeals to the 9v battery, but not to an AA battery, which needs a different sort of connective hardware.

Then there are the brand names: Enervator, a play on the brand name Energizer; and Zap, possibly a play on the Energizer MAX family of alkaline batteries, more likely just the vivid verb zap used for lightning strikes and the like.

Finally, #2 evokes two senses of hard-wired: in computers, ‘permanent, inalterable’; in behavior, ‘inborn, instinctive’. (The connecting idea is that what’s built-in can’t be changed.)

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Send in the border collies

February 11, 2023

It starts with an elegant Seth Fleishman cartoon in the latest New Yorker (2/13&20/23), and ends up in the world of very competent dogs; in between lie my home intellectual worlds of linguistics and g&s (gender & sexuality studies). Or you could just think of it as being about border collies and Robin Queen.

First comes the cartoon:


(#1) From left to right: on the escalator, the shepherd and three of his flock; on the ground, an understandably reluctant sheep and a border collie performing its job as herder

When advance copies of the cartoon appeared on Facebook, I immediately wrote my linguistics colleague Robin Queen (at Michigan) to say that it was as if Fleishman had created this cartoon especially for her; in addition to everything else she does (see below), Robin and her partner-in-life Susan Garrett run a small farm with a flock of sheep and with border collies that they have trained to herd them (collies that Robin enters with in stockdog competitions).

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Robotic ravioli

February 9, 2023

Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, in which George Lucas tangles with Hector Boiardi in an interleaved portmanteau:


(1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)

Orthographically, we’ve got Chef Boyardee (a brand of canned ravioli) confronting R2-D2 (a film robot), which don’t join easily to get Chef BoyR2D2. But it’s all in the pronunciation. In transcription, marked off in syllables, with the shared parts underlined:

bòj.ár.tu..tu  =  bòj.ar. + ár.tu..tu

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The tiger and his boytoy

February 8, 2023

… on the psychiatrist’s couch, in a 7/12/11 cartoon by Canadian cartoonist (illustrator, graphic novelist, and children’s book author) Dave Whamond:


(#1) A cartoon about cartoon characters (from Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson), with a character reversal — the tiger Hobbes is real, and the boy Calvin is his stuffed toy, though Hobbes fantasizes that the boy is real

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Narcisyphus

February 4, 2023

A Mark Anderson Andertoon (brought to my attention by several Facebook posters) with an excellent portmanteau: Narcisyphus = Narcissus + Sisyphus:


(#1) Anderson’s selfie cartoon #7599 (he has a whole series of them); there’s a Page on Andertoons on this blog

Narcissus. Narcissism — usually through reflections, in water or in a mirror, but here through taking a picture of yourself. Sisyphus — a whole cartoon meme here. Not the first time Narcissus and Sisyphus have been joined in a cartoon, but not so elegantly, in a single panel.

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Where are they now?

February 1, 2023

This is about comics superheroes, and the first thing you need to know is that I am not a Superhero Person. Occasionally, something from the comics, from animations, or from the movies comes by me, for one reason or another, but basically I’m an utter outsider who occasionally is moved to glance into this world. If you’re a fan, I respect your enthusiasms, but I don’t share them. Nevertheless, your worlds are a significant element in the popular culture that surrounds me, so I might want to have some awareness of them.

The second thing you need to know is that I’m looking at a report (about the mutant superhero Iceman) from the past — from nearly 7 years ago, in the New York Times on 12/24/15, when I noted it down for posting on, but then never got around to it. Now I wonder what’s happened to Iceman and his kind since then.

The third thing you need to know — which you will already know if you’re a reader of this blog — is that I’m a gay man with a lifetime of activism and of research and writing on the organization of LGBT+ life and the place of LGBT+ people in our culture. Which is why I am now curious about the fictional Iceman and his / our kind.

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The wildebeest caper

February 1, 2023

🐇 🐇 🐇 trois lapins to inaugurate the month of February. But wait! Are those the hoofbeats of … wildebeests? Stand clear! Make way for gnus!

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Zippy theorizes, syncretically, on the comic strips

January 31, 2023

🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for Ultimate January, as we leave the darkest period of the year in my hemisphere

The 7/24/22 Zippy strip:

(#1)

Zippy theorizes that comic-strip characters and their stories are an overlay of characters, personalities, settings, and tales from elsewhere in popular culture — in particular, from television shows. (Just to get some grip on these things in the real world, rather than ZippyWorld: Billy in The Family Circus has never marinated a duck breast.)

(Note: this is a Zippy strip, always liable to veer into surrealism and the injection of Zippreoccupations into things, so that not all the details are going to hang together coherently.)

Zippy offers these theories to Griffy from inside a sort of monument to pop-cultural syncretism, Davies’ Chuck Wagon Diner in Lakewood CO: something that was created as a reproduction of East Coast diner culture, but got crossed with the symbols of mythical cowboy culture, in the shape of a gigantic neon cowboy and a life-sized fiberglass horse. Located not in the dusty high plains of cowboy country, but on a commercial strip in a thoroughly built-up suburb of Denver. (I grant that you can at least see the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains from there.)

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Hello, Dalí!

January 30, 2023

Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro plunges us into a double play on words, plus a visual parody — offered on a platter — as well:


(#1) To understand the cartoon, you need to know about kosher delis (deli, short for delicatessen), and pastrami as a prominent offering in them; and about Salvador Dalí and his surrealist painting The Persistence of Memory (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)

The egregious pun kosher deli > kosher Dalí in combination with a play on the title of a Dalí painting Persistence of Memory > Persistence of Pastrami (with a visual parody on the painting itself, offered on a platter by the waiter; hence, Wayno’s title, “Culinary Surrealism”).

Dalí’s name is most commonly Englished as /ˈdali/, like Dolly, and that makes the deli > Dalí pun particularly close ( /ɛ/ > /a/, otherwise perfect), but sometimes maintains the Spanish / Catalan iambic accentuation as /daˈli/, in which case the imperfect pun is more distant.

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Maternal shrillness on Zits

January 29, 2023

Today’s Zits strip manages to assemble three disparate bits of assumption about cognition into a joke about maternal shrillness:


(#1) So shrill — in particular, so high-pitched — that it takes a ladder to get up there and read what’s in the speech balloon

Whoa! You might not have subscribed to any or all of these cognitive stances built into the strip:

— conceptualizing speech and thought balloons as physical objects

— perceiving women’s speech as shrill — an impression that incorporates (among other things) sociocultural associations of high pitch and loudness with various personal and interactional states, and also the association of high pitch with femininity

— (metaphorically) associating high pitch with height above the ground

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