Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
June 9, 2020
Background, from my 3/12/20 posting “Higashi Day cartoon 1: grim Bliss surprise” about the series of 6 cartoon postings (of which this is the 3rd)
to celebrate March 15th: Higashi Day, formerly known in these parts as (spring) Removal Day, marking the day when, for roughly 10 years in the fabled past, Jacques and I set off to car-trek east, from Palo Alto (and Stanford) to Columbus OH (and Ohio State).
The Frazz strip of March 8th:
(#1) School custodian Edwin “Frazz” Frazier and 8-year-old bored genius Caulfield take on “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”
In more or less reverse order: (a) the positive anymore of Caulfield’s
(ex1) Anymore, I just believe what rhymes
in the last panel; (b) the song and some of its most famous performances; and (c) the quote in the first panel,
(ex2) Believe half of what you see, and none of what you hear
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Posted in AAVE / Black English, Dialects, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Negation, Quotations, Syntax, Variation | Leave a Comment »
June 7, 2020
Annals of pandemic vocabulary: the N + N compound tribute time ‘a time (moment in a day) for tribute’, specialized for a specific form of tribute (largely, clapping) to a specific group of tributees (medical workers). The practice has been around for several months, but the label seems to have emerged more recently (I don’t have the resources to track these things down), and now it figures in today’s wry Doonesbury cartoon, about Zonker Harris and his nephew Zipper:
(#1)
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Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Semantics of compounds | 1 Comment »
June 5, 2020
The 5/27 Wayno/Piraro Bizarro collabo brings us two Grim Reapers confronting what might be a trap for them:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
If you want to catch Death in a trap, what do you use as bait? Obviously, not the conventional chunk of cheese, but dead cheese: moldy cheese. (Moldy cheese is, of course, not actually dead; in fact, the cheese is alive with the swarms of microbes.)
The cartoon nicely exploits an ambiguity, between the semantics of the conventionalized compound death trap / deathtrap, and the semantics of a compound Death trap, parallel to mouse trap / mousetrap.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Compounds, Language and food, Language and medicine, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Semantics, Semantics of compounds | 1 Comment »
June 4, 2020
A postcard from Ann Burlingham back in March, from an exhibition at the Frick Museum in Pittsburgh, with this ghostly vision:
(#1) Nick Veasey’s Boxer Shorts (2008)
From Wikipedia:
Nick Veasey is a British photographer working primarily with images created from X-ray imaging. Some of his works are partial photomanipulations with Photoshop. He therefore works with digital artists to realise his creations.
Born in London in 1962, he worked in the advertising and design industries and pursued work in conventional still photography before being asked to X-ray a cola can for a television show. Veasey also X-rayed the shoes he was wearing on the day and upon showing the finished image to an art director was galvanised by the response it provoked.
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Posted in Art, Childhood, Linguistics in the comics, Poetic form, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
May 30, 2020
Passed on by Jeff Bowles on FB today, this Pearls Before Swine cartoon from 2017:
By far the most outrageous elaborate pun I’ve seen from Pastis (others can be found in the Page on Pearls Before Swine on this blog). Set up bit by bit, accreting the components of the monstrously complex result. In a different order from the final result, of course, so you can’t appreciate where it’s going,
And then Pastis’s usual meta move in the last panel, in which the characters recognize that they’re in a cartoon. In this case, Rat produces Abraham Lincoln (and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”) to berate Pastis for his word play.
Posted in Comic conventions, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | 4 Comments »
May 24, 2020
Am I elected yet? Am I re-elected yet? Zippyclone examples from the US presidential elections in 1984 and 1988. The big campaign poster from 1984, with the former variant:
(#1) Taco sauce in hand, Ding Dongs at the ready, Zippy throws his topknot into the electoral ring, challenging President Ronald Reagan and former Vice President Walter Mondale (Hat tip: Tom Frenkel)
It looks like Zippy is a perpetual independent candidate, but most of the campaign literature is in comic books, calendars, and posters, rather than in the strips. I’ve found one strip on his presidential runs, from 2012 (in the mainstream: incumbent President Barack Obama vs. former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney):
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Posted in Language and politics, Linguistics in the comics, Snowclones | Leave a Comment »
May 22, 2020
Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro “Writer’s Block”, with a plumber coming to the rescue:
(#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 plumber’s explanation alerts us to the fact that this is about a pun (involving homonyms), but it doesn’t locate the responsible item. He’s holding out a shoe, indicating that this is the relevant object. Crucially, it’s not just any shoe, but a specific type of shoe, known as a … clog. Ah, and the plumber’s job was presumably to clear a clog in the toilet. (But ya gotta know your shoes.)
Further ah: the clog in the toilet was a clog.
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Posted in Clothing, Etymology, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Understanding comics | 3 Comments »
May 21, 2020
Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro (“Joust Desserts”) takes us to the restaurant Le Chevalier de Bon Goût, whose clientele is dragons:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbol in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there’s just one in this strip — see this Page.)
The dragons are wielding tools for cracking open knights in armor to get at the tasty meat inside: their versions of the wooden mallets and seafood crackers used for wrestling lobsters to submission. And they are wearing knight bibs: their version of the lobster bibs offered by seafood restaurants.
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Posted in Language and food, Linguistics in the comics | 2 Comments »
