A recent xkcd cartoon (#2372) plays with the sort of questionnaire that lexicographers and linguists have long used for investigating dialect differences:
Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
The xkcd dialect quiz
October 19, 2020Flesh Gordon
October 18, 2020Frank Abate points me to a 10/18 article in the Guardian: “Flesh Gordon? Artwork reveals erotic version that was never made: Draft designs for a planned Nicolas Roeg sci-fi movie in 1979 finally see the light of day” by Dalya Alberge:
(#1) Artwork for the abandoned film depicts Flash Gordon confronting Ming the Merciless on top of the emperor’s royal spaceship. Photograph: StudioCanal / King Features Inc.
One more Magritte homage
October 16, 2020From Vadim Temkin on Facebook on the 14th:
One more homage to Magritte: Lovers II [now with naked men]. I think for now I have enough Magritte for a while
(#1)
More onomatomania
October 14, 2020Today’s Zippy:
(#1)
From NOAD:
noun dodecahedron: a three-dimensional shape having twelve plane faces, in particular a regular solid figure with twelve equal pentagonal faces.
Sliced bread
September 29, 2020Today’s Zippy is an exercise in food history:
(#1) A hymn to sliced bread — from Chilicothe
Here, Bill Griffth makes an uncharacteristic mistake. If you say “Chillicothe” to most Americans, they will probably think of Chillicothe OH, as Griffith did (or they’ll just be baffled). But in fact the famed home of sliced bread is Chillicothe MO. The Ohio town is fairly small, but it was the first capital of Ohio, and it’s twice the size of the Missouri town.
Film blanc
September 27, 2020From my posting backlog, this Wayno/Piraro Bizarro from 1/17/20:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
If there’s a film noir, there must be a film blanc, right? If there’s black comedy, there must be white comedy, right? If there’s an X, there must be a ~X, the opposite of X.
The library hookers and booze joke
September 25, 2020
The multipurpose elephant
September 24, 2020In the 9/28 New Yorker, this Danny Shanahan cartoon:
(#1) “And this is Dyson.”
The cartoon is incomprehensible if you don’t know that Dyson is the name of a brand of vacuum cleaners (which come with a variety of attachments, as does the elephant above).
Feeling more one-headed
September 23, 2020The Zippy from 1/30/20, which I’ve been saving for the appropriate occasion, which has now materialized, as a follow-up to a note in my posting earlier today “Great progress, grave threat”:
Zippy’s crucial observation, in the first panel:
Sometimes, the two-headed dog makes me feel more one-headed!
Roughly, if you are far from (what counts as) normal, then someone who is further out than you are can make you feel almost normal.
Latinx
September 22, 2020
From the Vox site “Latina, Latino, or LatinX? Here’s how the term came about: The gender-neutral term that’s supposed to be for everyone, well, isn’t” by Terry Blas on 10/23/19
The occasion for this posting is a net conference yesterday on latinx — referring to an orthographic form; also to its various pronunciations by speakers of Spanish; and especially to its choice as an racial/ethnic/cultural (self-)descriptor.