Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
January 6, 2023
(Definitely a Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting, signaling that I’m still here, after several deeply awful days of medical afflictions — an experience I’ll record in a separate posting, rather than get in the way of an egregious pun for today’s celebration of the Three Magi.)
To get the joke in this Epiphany texty circulating on Facebook (hat tip to Evan Randall Smith) you have to supply background from two (unrelated) domains of cultural knowledge — (A) the Christian mythic tale of the Three Wise Men and the gifts they bring to the baby Jesus; and (B) the pop-cultural splendor of the Boardwalk product pitch famously used by tv adman Billy Mays:
(#1) To understand the thing at all, you need to know (A); but if you don’t know (B), there’s no joke, just a flat-footed recital of the Wise Men’s gifts
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Posted in Formulaic expressions, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Memes, Puns, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »
January 3, 2023
(On the personal background, see my Zardoz posting; the posting below is one I started yesterday but was unable to finish. Hard days.)
Yesterday’s Rhymes With Orange cartoon shows a collection of (apparently all male, to judge from the prickly body hair) penguins putting on their (tuxedo-like) overcoats for journeying home after a winter party:
(#1) Translation between worlds: the characters are all penguins, but they are also human beings in a modern social situation
These penguin suits are overcoats (somewhat resembling tuxedos); in the classic penguin-suit cartoon, however, the suits are actual tuxedos.
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Posted in Clothing, Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Mascots, Penguins, Slang | Leave a Comment »
December 30, 2022
The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro for New Year’s Eve Eve is a goofy amalgam of two different cartoon memes with an egregious pun; Wayno’s title is “Reclusive Russets” (russets being a type of potato). No, of course it doesn’t cohere; that’s what makes it delightful (remember that this strip is called Bizarro).
(#1) If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.
The Potato Head meme (all three characters are Potato Heads) and the seeker and the seer meme (one character is seeker, the other two seers), plus some CRAB / CARB play on the compound noun hermit crab, mountain-top seers being hermits who have removed themselves from ordinary life, and potatoes being carbs, specifically starches (complex carbohydrates )
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Posted in Abbreviation, Comic conventions, Compounds, Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Puns, Race and ethnicity, Semantics of compounds | 2 Comments »
December 29, 2022
A modest challenge to cartoon understanding in the 12/17 Rhymes With Orange, which depends on your knowing about a bit of antique technology and its metaphorical name in English. Price and Piccolo have strewn hints around in the cartoon, but still, if you’re not familiar with the crucial piece of technology, you won’t get the joke.
(#1) Two rabbits sit in odd positions on a couch (with their ears standing up), in front of a screen
Clues to understanding, beyond the peculiar postures: the references to reception (in the title of the strip), specifically to tv reception (via cable); the reference to Gramps, evoking the old days; Gramps’s claim that their postures are somehow conducive to the point of their activity.
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Posted in Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Technology, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
December 29, 2022
Suppose you’re a cartoonist, and this POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) has, well, popped into your head:
eggs Benedict Arnold = eggs Benedict (breakfast dish of sliced ham on English muffin with hollandaise sauce) + Benedict Arnold (American general who defected to the British during the Revolutionary War)
Can you work this (entertainingly) surprising juxtaposition of elements into a cartoon?
Today, Mike Peters (of Mother Goose and Grimm) took up the challenge:
(#1) The solution is a play on traitor: an egg dish named for a traitor, sold at a place named Traitor Joe’s — with a trader / traitor pun alluding to the grocery chain Trader Joe’s (a perfect pun for most Americans, for whom trader and traitor are homophones; a clever imperfect pun for everyone else
Sweet. Meanwhile, others have labored to devise variants of eggs Benedict that are somehow associable with Benedict Arnold.
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Posted in Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Puns | 1 Comment »
December 25, 2022
(There will be plain talk, in street language, about sexual acts, so this posting is not for kids or the sexually modest.)
From Richard Hershberger (passed on to me by David Kathman), this 1920 magazine ad:
(#1) Hershberger’s comment: Run a Google image search on “Santa Claus cigarette” and a startling number of results pop up. This one is my favorite, as Santa clearly is taking a smoke while in the afterglow.
Things to talk about: postorgasmic afterglow; Turkish tobacco; Murad cigarettes; the ad campaign for the cigarettes by Rea Irvin; graphic artist Rea Irvin. First the sex, then the smokes — starting with the tobacco, in a chain of topics where each leads to the next.
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Posted in Art, Holidays, Language and plants, Language in advertising, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »
December 23, 2022
Following on yesterday’s “Elfshelfisms” posting, on The Elf on the Shelf book and the scout-elf toy and on elf on a shelf visual riddling (lemur on a femur etc.), brief adventures of shelf elves at play: in the Nasty Elf genre of playful folk depictions of scout elves posed doing nasty, gross, and raunchy things (depictions passed around on the net the way variants of a joke form are passed around by word of mouth); and in human ShelfElfin figures engaged in similar play (specifically in soft porn, those naughty hunky boys).
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Posted in Gay porn, Holidays, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Movies, Understanding comics | 1 Comment »
December 18, 2022
… the Christmas penguins embrace:
(#1) In the sky, the green shimmer of an aurora; on the ground, a parent penguin nurtures their young one (in a green knitted cap)
The image comes to me from Joel Levin (one of the most faithful readers of this blog) for my collection of penguiniana. It came to him in a corporate holiday card from Fidelity Investments, where its visual message of parental care was sandwiched between conventional holiday greetings:
Wishing you a magical holiday
[Fidelity Penguin gif]
Here’s to all the good things the season brings.
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Posted in Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Penguins, Signs and symbols | 1 Comment »
December 16, 2022
A very brief note on masculinity, today drawing on an old Peanuts cartoon (Jeff Bowles re-runs them for us every day):
A new collar, presumed to project aggressiveness via its fierce spikes, with aggressiveness then understood as a mark of masculinity — but Snoopy’s a happy dog, not a fierce dog, and that suits him
Two things.
Thing 1: spiked collars for dogs are not necessarily a sign of an aggressive dog, but are used to protect dogs from throat-biting attacks from predators and aggressive other dogs. Sweet dogs get spiked collars if they travel in bad neighborhoods. Guard dogs may get spiked collars so that they can ward off attacks on their charges.
Thing 2: whatever their bdsm origins might have been, spiked collars worn by people now seem to be primarily fashion statements, valued because they’re so noticeable. But, since they stand out, they also serve to call attention to the wearer’s collar, which is a sign of their bondage and/or submission; as a result, a spiked collar conveys not aggressiveness, but subservience.
Posted in Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity | Leave a Comment »
December 15, 2022
(Warning: a partial draft of this essay was accidentally posted an hour and a half ago. I know from bitter experience that trying to delete a posted draft and replace it with the final product unfolds into disaster, so I’m just treating this as an update of that earlier posting. Please bear with me.)
In today’s (12/15) Rhymes With Orange cartoon, a delightful exercise in cartoon understanding: to appreciate the point of the joke (set in a pet store and focused on tropical fish), you need to know something quite specific about modern American popular culture, having to do with circus acts.
(#1) Two young women — perhaps, we speculate, a couple, though that seems not to be relevant to the joke — have bought some (tropical) fish, in water in plastic bags (two in one bag, one in the other); the pet store clerk is now handing them a bag of clownfish as well: a bag jam-packed to the brim with brightly colored tiny fish
Why is that funny?
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Posted in Art, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Understanding comics | 4 Comments »
