… in today’s comics feed, both connecting to earlier postings on this blog: a Rhymes With Orange on an ambiguity in the verbing to dust; and a Zippy on Magritte’s painting The Son of Man.
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Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
Two cartoons on the 30th
January 30, 2021
Learning culture
January 28, 2021The One Big Happy cartoon from 1/6, recently up in my comics feed:
Ruthie and Joe are engaged in picking up elements of culture — American commercial culture, to be specific — beginning this particular bit of learning by reproducing material they’ve heard on tv, without much appreciation for what it means.
This is in line with kids’ learning of other bits of culture — song lyrics, joke routines, patterns of swearing and insulting, greeting and leave-taking routines, and much much more. At the same time that kids are picking up new words at a great rate, they are also incorporating those words into ways of performing the verbal bits of social life. (Meanwhile, they’re learning gestures, facial expressions, the physical elements of dances, games, and sports, and the rest of a vast universe of nonverbal behavior, which then has to be coordinated with verbal behavior.)
And much of this has to be picked up “on the fly”, from observing what people around you do, without being explicitly instructed — a fact that guarantees that their first efforts at performing these bits of culture will be decidedly imperfect and will have to be honed by practice.
Cure Bear
January 19, 2021Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, which can be understood only if you know about two (hugely distant) bits of popular culture:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
That’s The Cure + Care Bear = Cure Bear: linguistically, a portmanteau; visually, a composite of Robert Smith of the band The Cure and one of the Care Bear toys.
Collocation restriction
January 17, 2021Today’s Ada@Home cartoon by Rob Harrell exemplifies the restriction of lexical items to specific collocations:
Flat on his back at the solstice
January 15, 2021Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, framed as an instance of the Psychiatrist cartoon meme:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)
The patient is lying on the therapeutic couch, but he’s also flat on hs back suffering the affective disorder that comes to many with the winter solstice (Wayno’s title for the cartoon: “Bummer Solstice” — playing on summer solstice).
Then the title “Tropical Depression”, ordinarily referring to a meterological phenomenon, involving lowered atmospheric pressure (depression) arising in the tropics (the geographical band surrounding the equator)[*see note after this paragraph]; but here referring to a mental condition (depression, characterized by lowered energy and affect), in this case, specifically, seasonal affective disorder (aka seasonal melancholy) triggered by the short, dark, cold days around the winter solstice — which the patient seems to be counteracting with cultural symbols associated with the bright, hot, and humid tropics (Hawaii, to be specific): beachcomber hat, lei, coconut drink, ukulele, and Hawaiian beach shorts.
[*Note added 1/17: this account of the tropical in tropical depression is grossly oversimplified. For a more accurate statement — from an actual meteorologist — see Sim Aberson’s comment on this posting.]
Jay Gould
January 14, 2021(The second of three morning names from some time ago.)
From Wikipedia:
Jason [generally known as Jay] Gould (May 27, 1836 – December 2, 1892) was an American railroad magnate and financial speculator who is generally identified as one of the robber barons of the Gilded Age. His sharp and often unscrupulous business practices made him one of the wealthiest men of the late nineteenth century. Gould was an unpopular figure during his life and remains controversial.
Gould’s sharp business practices made him the target of the political cartoonists of the day, who churned out wicked caricatures of him.
A carnival of omission
January 14, 2021The Mother Goose and Grimm cartoon from 9/11/18:
What Grimm says to Ralph is just a bare NP, but what it conveys is the content an entire sentence, but with almost all of its parts “omitted” — that is, implicit, rather than explicitly expressed: That’s / It’s the last time I let you talk me into flipping my house.
— a subject that or it or something similar (referring to some antecedent that’s loosely in the context — here, Ralph’s convincing Grimm to flip his house) can be omitted (SubjOmit, Ref type)
— in combination with SubjOmit (of several types), a copular verb (specifically, a form of BE, here is or ‘s) can be omitted (VerbOmit in combination with SubjOmit)
— in sentence-initial position, certain occurrences of articles (primarily the definite article the) can be omitted (ArtOmit)
All of these phenomena are constrained in complex ways by conditions having to do with which items are affected, in which circumstances. Below I’ll run through the phenomena with a few examples selected from my files, plus some notes about the conditions.
Two from xkcd
January 12, 2021… on linguistic topics: 2381 The True Name of the Bear and 2390 Linguists. The first brings us Gretchen McCulloch as a bonus.
Western medicine
January 6, 2021The Wayno/Piraro Bizarro for Epiphany (1/6) — Wayno’s title: “Lone Prairie Pre-Op” — plays on the ambiguity of Western, and taps into a bit of lore about the American Old West:
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
Western medicine ‘the medicine in Westerns’ (illustrated above) vs. Western medicine ‘medicine characteristic of the Western region of the world, in particular of Europe and the U.S.’ (contrasted with Eastern medicine, earlier Oriental medicine).
Loss of perspective
January 2, 2021Today’s (1/2/21) Zippy strip, set in a diner tucked away in a corner of the small rural town of Hillsville VA:
(#1) Virgil is the counterman at the Hillsville Diner; the other speaker is an unnamed (and flatly drawn) Dingburger customer
Note that Bill Griffith’s drawing of the Hillsville Diner is perspectival, as his drawings generally are. The shift to a flat line drawing half-way though the strip is jarring.