Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
November 12, 2025
Yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro shows us a budding balloon artist at the very beginning of his career, where he creates the simplest of balloon animals, before advancing to the balloon dog:
(#1) The raw material of balloon sculpture is cylindrical balloons, which can then be twisted and tied together; this trainee has the cylindrical balloons, but as yet has had no practice in manipulating them, so he offers for sale the unprocessed balloons, which the buyer just has to imagine as different roughly cylindrical animals — here an earthworm, here a snake, here (where we break up in laughter) a lowly nematode (most nematodes are tiny, less than 2.5 mm long) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Signs and symbols, Toys and games | Leave a Comment »
November 4, 2025
A brief follow-up to my 11/2 posting “poetite”, about the NYT’s Spelling Bee puzzle, in which I wrote:
Spelling Bee’s dictionary is mighty persnickety. Editor Sam Ezersky uses some standard dictionaries as a rough basis for his puzzle dictionary, but his judgments are strongly personal, and consequently often fiercely disputed. Grievances are sometimes unloaded in Facebook.
A comment that led to a Facebook exchange between Karen Davis and me.
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Posted in Age, Lexicography, Linguistics in the comics, Toys and games, Word play | Leave a Comment »
October 30, 2025
💀 💀 💀 three days in October: Halloween Eve, Halloween, Day of the Dead — with today’s Bob cartoon for the second of these occasions; and then the Day of the Dead is also a significant day for me personally — my (Path to) Sobriety Day, the day I took my last drink, 5 years ago now
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Posted in Books, Events and occasions, Holidays, Language and animals, Language of medicine, Linguistics in the comics, My life, This blogging life, Writers | Leave a Comment »
October 28, 2025
From Ed Battistella on Facebook on 10/25, this remarkable Halloween display in a corner lot in Ashland OR not far from EB’s house:
(#1) A solid-dark figure of dread — not jolly fun, not even edgy fun — and mortal decay (remnants of its clothes are falling away from the black skeleton), with none of the conventional features of skeletal Halloween memento mori (no white skull or face, but charcoal black; no stylized scythe, but a peasant’s scythe in black, with a rough wooden handle and a crudely hand-tempered blade), posing unsteadily amongst the detritus of material destruction, even the skull of a baby
The dark lord of death, the Grim Reaper, in autumnal haze, mid-day, on an ordinary suburban street, stalking the home of Southern Oregon University (where EB hangs out), the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Lithia Park, and strikingly liberal politics.
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Posted in Costumes, Holidays, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Signs and symbols | 1 Comment »
October 27, 2025
The title (taking off on As the World Turns) of today’s (10/27/25) Zippy strip, in which Griffy and Zippy balance the pros against the cons for our planet:
(#1) Griffy sez: what makes the world go round isn’t love, but greed, lust, denial, and (of course) the conservation of angular momentum
But wait! We’ve seen this strip before.
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Posted in Cartoonists, Culture, Homosexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Photography, Pop culture | Leave a Comment »
October 26, 2025
In today’s Rhymes With Orange strip, a sale at Bath and Body World:
A sale of body parts from and/or for monsters — not what comes to mind when you come across the N + N compound monster sale, which is a dauntingly large sale, one that’s (metaphorically) a monster
Now the details.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Language and the body, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Semantics of compounds, Syntactic categories | 2 Comments »
October 15, 2025
The most recent Stephan Pastis Pearls Before Swine strip:
A classic NAA (non-apology apology): if you take offence, it’s your problem (in the strip: I’m sorry you were offended; ramped up: I’m sorry you’re an oversensitive ninny) (see Edwin L. Battistella’s Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology (Oxford, 2014))
From Wikipedia:
A non-apology apology, sometimes called a backhanded apology, empty apology, nonpology, or fauxpology, is a statement in the form of an apology that does not express remorse for what was done or said, or assigns fault to those ostensibly receiving the apology. It is common in politics and public relations.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Apologies, Insults, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Speech acts, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
