Linguistics in the comics | Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category

The medal

December 21, 2020

An old (12/21/18) Wayno/Piraro Bizarro — Wayno’s title “Ribbon Shot” — resurrected for its current relevance:

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)

Back then, it was about the annual flu shot — which of course still happens; I had mine a while back — and about lollipops being given to children as rewards for displaying bravery.

Now it’s vaccination for Covid-19, and public displays of medical professionals and public figures enthusiastically getting their shots, to serve as models for all of us.

Posted in Language of medicine, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

What question are you asking?

December 20, 2020

The 11/27 One Big Happy strip, which came up in my comics feed recently:

The father’s question, asking for a choice, appears to be an opinion-seeking question, of a sort that adults often exchange amongst one another to make pleasant small talk or as a kind of game. But note the father’s open laptop: the opinion-seeking question is being used here as a form of test question, in which the kids are supposed to display their knowledge of culturally significant people. And the kids are perfectly aware that the exercise is some kind of test.

There is, unfortunately, another variable here: the father’s question offers choices at two points: what person (that’s the question he’s intending to ask) and living or dead (which the father intends to be clarifying the range of persons that could be possible answers, but which the kids take to be the question at issue.

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Posted in Child language, Initialisms, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Speech acts | 1 Comment »

Denials

December 18, 2020

The One Big Happy cartoon from 11/26, just up in my feed:

Crucial fact: if the question had been “Are you decisive?”, Ruthie’s answer would have been different: “I don’t know — because I don’t know what that means”. Instead, the question was linguified — it was about what Ruthie would say about her decisiveness, not directly about her decisiveness. So she answered that question.

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Politeness, Pragmatics | 2 Comments »

An old hand, and two young hands

December 17, 2020

In the latest (12/21) New Yorker, two cartoons that especially caught my eye: one by a very old hand in the business, George Booth (now 94); the other by two young women (roughly 30), Sophie Lucido Johnson and Sammi Skolmoski (both of whom are writers as well as artists). The Booth is an absurd literalization of the idiom (put the) cart before the horse. The SLJ/SS is wryly funny as it stands, but gains immeasurably if you know about a particular children’s book.

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Posted in Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

/ol/ vs. /old/

December 16, 2020

In the One Big Happy from 11/23, recently appeared in my comics feed, Ruthie and her grandfather spar over the choice between /ol/ and /old/ as the PST form of the verbs STEAL and TELL and the BSE/PRS forms of the verb HOLD.

There are, as it turns out, two quite different phenomena here, one having to do with the choice of an inflectional form (the PST of STEAL), the other having to do with the omission of word-final /d/ in casual pronunciations in connected speech (in the PST of TELL and the BSE/PRS of HOLD).

Ruthie’s grandfather, however, treats the two phenomena as comparable, and also, unreasonably, treats the casual pronunciations as requiring correction.

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Posted in Dialects, Inflection, Linguistics in the comics, Morphology, Style and register, Terminology | Leave a Comment »

Books in the age of Zoom

December 16, 2020

A recent Tom Gauld bookish cartoon:

Commenters tend to note that the first two piles seem to be way too small for most serious book people.

Sign of the times: “Books I want people to see behind me on Zoom calls”.

Posted in Acronyms, Books, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

The fish art of Ray Troll

December 15, 2020

An accidental find in preparing yesterday’s posting on Ray Troll’s 2011 political cartoon “Octopi Wall Street”: a whole vein of Ray Troll fish art, most of it silly or raunchy, full of bad puns and surprising references to fish (“The Da Vinci Cod”, featuring the Mona Lisa with a fish). Four examples from a great many…

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Posted in Art, Evolution, Language and animals, Language and culture, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Rhyme | Leave a Comment »

A bit more Schrödinger

December 14, 2020

(One more posting with pre-hospital material on my desktop.)

Earlier on this blog, in my 6/24/20 posting “Annals of ambiguity: I feel like making it rough for Schrödinger”, there’s a section on a photograph, labeled “Schrödinger’s Dumpster”, of a dumpster with the signage: EMPTY WHEN FULL (with notes on Schrödinger cartoons, which have become something of a cartoon meme.

Here, two more cartoons.

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Posted in Language and science, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »