Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
December 5, 2025
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro is an advanced exercise in cartoon understanding: a wordless strip (no speech, no caption) in which a tuxedoed performer takes a bow, next to a toy piano:
Ah, he seems to be a pianist, and the tiny piano, no more than a foot long, must be his instrument; at that point, you are baffled — unless you’re familiar with a classic walk-into-bar joke (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there’s only 1 in this strip — see this Page)
In this variant of the classic joke, that piano is in fact 12 inches long, a 12-inch piano, so the performer is a 12-inch pianist. This is the status conferred on him by a genie when he wished for a 12-inch penis. Whoops.
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Posted in Jokes, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Understanding comics | 10 Comments »
November 28, 2025
Briefly noted. In the latest New Yorker issue (of 12/1/25), cartoonist Meredith Southland suggests a solution to the puzzle of what penguins are doing when they waddle around waving their wings in the air:
(#1) They are playing Charades! Well, life on the ice floes of Antarctic imagination offers few interesting diversions, but this communal game can occupy plenty of dark cold time
The all-time favorite penguin game, however, is Hide and Seek, a spheniscid take-off on Where’s Waldo? Sometimes known as Lost in the Crowd. Though ice-sliding and egg-rolling races are both tremendously popular. Never a dull South Polar moment.
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Posted in Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Penguins, Toys and games | 2 Comments »
November 26, 2025
As soon as the sun rose on November 1st — All Saints Day — the Christmas music began. All of it, including the two monumentally maddening hammer-stroke repetitive songs “The Twelve Days of Christmas” and “The Little Drummer Boy”. My first thought for a remedy — a bullet to the brain to everyone who plays either song in public (everyone is welcome to play them behind closed doors, with effective acoustic insulation in place, of course; I am not an uncivilized monster) — turns out to be not only illegal, but also immoral; no matter what the provocation, aesthetic violence, especially of the fatal variety, apparently offends the sensibilities of our society.
So I propose a different remedy: removing miscreants from the public sphere, cordoning them off where their songs can no longer disrupt people of good will, while meting out a punishment that truly fits the crime. Not aesthetic execution, but aesthetic imprisonment:
A Mick Stevens cartoon, from the 8/17/81 issue of the New Yorker
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Posted in Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Music | 2 Comments »
November 21, 2025
(#1) Alfred Tennyson,”The Lady of Shalott” (1832)
A Joe Dator cartoon in the latest (11/24/25) print issue of the New Yorker poses the question, “What if Humpty Dumpty had survived his fall?”
Humpty Dumpty is an egg. An egg contains a developing chicken embryo. The embryo will eventually mature, crack through the egg, and emerge as a chick. (There is even theme music for this scenario, Mussorgsky’s “Ballad of the Unhatched Chicks / the Chicks in their Shells”, from “Pictures at an Exhibition”.)
JD shows the first moment of emergence, the chick’s head bursting through the chest of a dismayed Humpty Dumpty, who is toppling backwards in his chair — a scene that will be viscerally painful for modern audiences familiar with the 1979 movie Alien, with its famously grotesque Chestbuster scene, but will in any case evoke a fatal heart attack :
(#2) Humpty Dumpty and his female companion at table, when the mortal wound opens up; it will crack him from side to side
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Posted in Comic conventions, Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Language and medicine, Linguistics in the comics, Monsters, Movies and tv, Music, Poetry | 5 Comments »
November 15, 2025
Today’s Pearls Before Swine, in which Rat lives up to his name:
The crucial point: take you to lunch in the context of birthday greetings to Goat — in this context, clearly an instance of the phrasal idiom I’ll label take someone to (‘host someone at (an event), treat someone to (an event)’), and so understood by Goat (and, I think, by all readers of this strip); but then, in a kind of lexicographic bait and switch, Rat maintains that he meant only the caused-motion verb take (‘convey something to (an event at) some place’) and takes no responsibility for paying for the occasion
Then, in an appendix to this main discussion, I expose my bafflement at the treatment of the phrasal idiom take someone to in dictionaries: I can’t find one that lists it (while treat someone to is well covered).
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Posted in Ambiguity, Implicature, Language change, Lexical semantics, Lexicography, Linguistics in the comics, Semantics | 1 Comment »
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 »
