Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
January 19, 2023
In yesterday’s installment, the two kids of the Lombard family in the comic strip One Big Happy, Ruthie and Joe, advance a devious — and transparently malicious — idea about the pragmatics of conversation. As a slogan,
Two nasties make a nice.
That is, saying two nasty things about someone counts as saying a nice thing about them, yuk yuk. We-e-ell, the kids maintain, with impish speciousness, that that’s just a special case of the general principle that
Two negatives make a positive.
First thing: such a slogan is a highly abbreviated formula in ordinary language of some significant technical principle, the virtue of the slogan being that it is striking and memorable; it’s an aide-memoire. But it’s just a label, and labels are not definitions.
Second thing: the kids’ version exploits a massive ambiguity in the adjectives negative / positive, and a corresponding ambiguity in the verb make. To which I now turn.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Compositional semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Negation, Opposition, Semantics, Syntax | 5 Comments »
January 18, 2023
Two One Big Happy strips on double negatives, in which Joe and Ruthie take the slogan Two negatives make a positive into fresh territory. Today, I’ll give you the two strips, with my complete commentary on this blog for the first of these strips, and put off until tomorrow a broad-scale analysis of what’s going on here.
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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Negation, Semantics, Syntax | Leave a Comment »
January 17, 2023
It begins with a Facebook posting by Bob Eckstein on 1/12:
BE:
The Daily Cartoonist just ran
this piece … and that is Sam Gross on the cover on the right:
(#1) The BE cartoon: a bearded fellow — I take him to be a cartoonist (since this is in The Daily Cartoonist) — in a hospital bed, post-simectory
Note simectory ‘the surgical removal of a simian’ — in this case not an actual simian, but the simulacrum of a monkey: a one-man-band-monkey toy. I hadn’t realized that such toys are still being made, but it seems that they are (classically they are wind-up metal — “tin” — toys, but now they appear to be battery-operated plastic, and considerably more durable than the vintage versions; I speak with recollected sorrow over the short life of my very own monkey-band toy, roughly 75 years ago).
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Posted in Art, Cartoonists, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Toys, Writers, Writing | 1 Comment »
January 14, 2023
From the world of anthropomorphic (AmE) cookies, a Seeker and the Seer memic cartoon, in the Rhymes With Orange strip for 1/11:
In the cartoon meme of the Seeker and the Seer, the seeker scales a mountainside to seek enlightenment (and perfection) from the master
In the Piccolo / Price strip, you have to recognize the meme, see that the characters are anthropomorphic cookies, and identify the seer as a “Chinese fortune cookie” (with its fortune sticking out). That’s a lot of work in cartoon understanding.
I got all that, and so admired the assembly of these disparate elements in a single, wordless image. Just lovely.
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Posted in Comic conventions, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
January 13, 2023
The 1/11 Wayno / Piraro Bizarro displays the intersection of two cartoon worlds:
— a polar cartoon world of winter and cold, populated by stereotypical Eskimos and anthropomorphic polar bears, penguins, and (directly relevant here) snowmen (or, more generally, snowfolk)
— a tropical cartoon world of sun and surf, populated by stereotypical tropical islanders (especially Hawaiians), surfers, and the clientele of tiki bars
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Posted in Clothing, Comic conventions, Costumes, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Pop culture, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »
January 11, 2023
From the New York Times Book Review, 1/8/23 in print, p. 23:
Sketchbook / Cat People / By Bob Eckstein and Nava Atlas. Famous authors and their beloved feline companions.
From Ursula LeGuin through Patricia Highsmith
Bob Eckstein is a best-selling author and the world’s only snowman expert. His new book is “The Complete Book of Cat Names (That Your Cat Won’t Answer to, Anyway)”.
Nava Atlas is a cookbook author and the creator of Literary Ladies’ Guide.
(You’ll need to embiggen the image to appreciate the pleasures of the text.)
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Posted in Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Writers | 1 Comment »
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 »
