Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

The portmanteau truck

January 31, 2022

🐯🐅🐯(tiger – tiger – tiger, rather than rabbit- rabbit – rabbit) anticipating by a bit the new month tomorrow (February, holding the promise that — in the Northern Hemisphere — winter will in fact come to an end) and also the (lunar) new year, the Year of the Tiger

Meanwhile, this morning’s e-mail brings me a Wayno/Piraro Bizarro with the excellent POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) portmanteau truck = portmanteau + tow truck, the truck in question being a brunch (breakfast + lunch) truck where you can get Tofurkey (tofu + turkey) with Dijonnaise (Dijon + mayonnaise) dressing and a cronut (croissant + doughnut), which you can eat with a spork (spoon + fork).

At the same time, a Daily Jocks ad that’s at once charming and raunchy, featuring a model wearing a garment I would call a moosinglet, a moose singlet, that is, a wrestling singlet in which the model is displaying a moose-knuckle, a penis (especially an erect one) that is visible though the wearer’s clothing.

And then portmanteau truck will lead us to portmanteau jam as a name for a POP chain.

(more…)

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Phallicity, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Portmanteaus, Underwear | 2 Comments »

Le journal du phoque d’approbation

January 27, 2022

… est sur le bureau de mon oncle. Or something like that. Two recent Wayno / Piraro Bizarros: from the 24th, le journal (for example, Le Monde, on sale on the street); from today (the 27th), le phoque d’approbation (and his best buddy, le morse du dédain).

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | 3 Comments »

Three memic moments

January 21, 2022

… in the cartoons. Two — a Joseph Dottino and a William Haefeli — from the latest (1/24/22) New Yorker, plus a Wayno/Piraro Bizarro from 1/19. Recognizable penguins, upscale gay-male couples, and crash test dummies, oh my!

(more…)

Posted in Comic conventions, Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Penguins | 2 Comments »

The infested apple

January 18, 2022

Today’s Price / Piccolo Rhymes With Orange, again with the apple:


(#1) Just silly-surreal… unless you know René Magritte’s 1964 surrealist painting The Son of Man (French: Le fils de l’homme), in which case it’s second-hand surrealism

(more…)

Posted in Art, Linguistics in the comics, Understanding comics, Use and mention, Words and things | 3 Comments »

On the couch

January 15, 2022

The saga of Psychiatrist cartoons rolls on, with unusual analysands in two strips that have come my way recently: a stalk of broccoli (in the winner of a contest to caption a Lonnie Millsap drawing) and a cephalopod (in a Victoria Roberts cartoon from 2012 that I stumbled on while harvesting a recent Roberts cartoon for an entirely different purpose).

But then the Psychiatrist cartoon meme is extraordinarily welcoming to bizarre patients on the couch — all manner of non-human analysands (as above) or thoroughly fictive ones (Superman and Batman are frequently in need of therapy).

(more…)

Posted in Comic conventions, Language and animals, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics | 2 Comments »

The teen fugue

January 11, 2022

Yesterday’s (1/10) Wayno/Piraro Bizarro revives plays on fugue and minor (exploited in a 2012 Bizarro), plus (in the title FUGUE IN A MINOR) a clunky play on A the name of a musical key vs. a the indefinite article (which are visually identical in all-caps printing):


(#1) The cartoon figure is a version of the classic portrait of the late Beethoven — the Beethoven of the Grosse Fuge — looking stormily rebellious in a Romantic red scarf, tempered by an image of Johann Sebastian Bach — the great master of the fugue as a musical form — in the powdered wig characteristic of the 18th century (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)

The word plays are on fugue, musical (“this piece”) or medical (“drifted aimlessly”); and minor, musical (“A minor”) or chronological (“my early teens”, “a minor”).

A look back at the 2012 posting, which had a different play on minor (the minor of music or the minor of significance), and so provided no justification for Wayno’s title for #1, “The First Emo”, with its allusion to emo kids / emos, who stereotypically are sensitive, socially dissociated, rebellious teenagers. And then some reflection on the cartoon composer in #1.

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Linguistics in the comics, Modification, Music, Puns, Syntax | Leave a Comment »

Commercial Christmas 2021: DJ’s third quarter

January 6, 2022

(Well, men’s homo-underwear ads, featuring what are intended to be alluring male bodies, and skirting the line of outrageous lewdness. Clearly not to everyone’s taste.)

Following up on yesterday’s Twelfth Night posting (“Three days of commercial Christmas”), about the Daily Jocks treatment of the second quarter of the 12 days of commercial Christmas — Days 4 (12/16, calling birds), 5 (12/17, golden rings), and 6 (12/18, geese) — for Epiphany itself today, the DJ treatment of the third quarter: Days 7 (12/19, swans), with fetishwear; 8 (12/20, maids), with traditional jockstraps; and 9 (12/21, ladies), with — hiss, boo — a mystery jock offer, nothing to see here.

Nothing says Christmas like harnesses and old-school jockstraps.

In any case: a quick tour of DJ’s Days 7 and 8, then a survey of Epiphany on this blog.

(more…)

Posted in Art, Facial expressions, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

Three days of commercial Christmas

January 5, 2022

(On the first of these three days, this posting gets right into details of men’s bodies and sex between men, in very plain language, so it’s out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest.)

In the current world, it’s 1/5/22: it’s Twelfth Night (Epiphany Eve) on the Christian calendar. Celebrated in this cartoon from a Liz Climo series (originally on Tumblr in 2013):


(#1) From Liz Climo’s 12 Days of Christmas, as depicted in exchanges between a bear and a bunny — on Day 1, from Bear: “The partridge flew away, and I ate all of the pears”

But back in the Commercial Christmastide of 2021, from Daily Jocks, it’s Day 4 (12/16, Beethoven Austen Day in the real world; Pure for Men in DJ’s Homoland, which will take us right into the down and dirty of sex between men, behind Pure’s veil of “all-natural cleanliness”), Day 5 (a disappointing 12/17, nothing but DJ gift cards), and Day 6 (12/18, Amplify x Circuit underwear from DJX, finally some male bodies to appreciate!).

(more…)

Posted in Holidays, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Underwear | 5 Comments »

Adventures in a balloon

January 2, 2022

In today’s (1/2/22) Bizarro, the Old Balloon Peddler hawks his wares in the park:


(#1) And thought balloons too! Take a word or thought ride in one of these sturdy inflatable delights (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)

The Magical Adventure Balloon Ride
— a private basket adventure exclusively for thrill seekers

He gives the kids free samples
Because he knows full well
That today’s young innocent faces
Will be tomorrow’s clientele

(more…)

Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Play | 1 Comment »

Our frugal cartoonists

January 1, 2022

🐇 🐇 🐇 + 🐇 🐇 🐇 (three for the new month, three for the new year)

It’s about re-using resources. In particular, re-using cartoon artwork for fresh purposes — a regular practice in (among the strips I follow regularly) Zippy the Pinhead and Bizarro. In Zippy, it’s mostly re-texting an old strip; but in Bizarro, it’s mostly assembling a strip from a collection of standard components arranged in a standard abstract pattern — rather like a syntactic construction.

The topic for New Year’s: assembling a Bizarro Psychiatrist strip.

(more…)

Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »