Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
December 17, 2019
… is you in your homowear. I just want you for my own / More than you could ever know.
From Daily Jocks ads of the season: Boy offers himself, in his Cellblock 13 Covert jock and harness, to serve his Master; and SeksiMatti lowers his Helsinki Athletica shorts to make his jockstrap-framed pygian orbs available for use.
(A dip into gay male fetish-land, with bdsm, and puppy play as well; and then into the sexual display of the male body, especially the buttocks — so not for kids or the sexually modest, though there will be an entirely innocent digression into the self-deprecating Finnish cartoon character Matti.)
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Posted in Captions, Finnish, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Names, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
December 16, 2019
Superhero pin-up boys, specifically, by David Talaski-Brown (DTB from now on), from a POPSUGAR piece “This Artist Smashes Stereotypes by Giving Male Superheroes a Sexy, Pinup-Style Makeover” by Victoria Messina on 7/5/19:
(#1) DTB’s Captain America and his panties
In David Talaski-Brown’s mind, Thor doesn’t wear a red cape and full-body armor — he rocks a pink polka-dotted robe, green Hulk slippers, and, well, that’s about it. A 29-year-old artist from Portland, OR, David is flipping the script with male superheroes, giving them a sexy makeover as a nod to the way scantily clad female superheroes are traditionally depicted.
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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics | 2 Comments »
December 15, 2019
The last in a set of four; the linguistics quilt, from the 19th, is its predecessor. As before, a 12-panel composition (roughly 6 x 3 ft) made of old t-shirts of mine, assembled into a quilt by Janet Salsman, with the collaboration of Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky and Kim Darnell (and photos by Kim). This time, t-shirts with images that have pleased or entertained me:
(#1)
Now the 12 panels individually, by row (R) and column (C).
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Posted in Academic life, Art, Language and food, Language and plants, Linguistics in the comics, Logos, Mammoths, Movies and tv, My life, Poetry, Puns, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »
December 13, 2019
It’s Eva Marie Saint Lucy’s Day and, in today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro combo, a Kurt Russell terrier bounds in:
(#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.)
First, Kurt Russell and the Russell terrier. Then Eva Marie Saint and St. Lucy’s Day. In both cases, a member of what I’ve called the Acting Corps (see the Page on this blog), with a name in a POP (a phrasal overlap portmanteau; see the Page on this blog).
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Posted in Actors, Holidays, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Shirtlessness, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »
December 7, 2019
What do you say to convey that you can’t find any words to describe your state of mind? What’s the verbal equivalent of the speechlessness emoji 😶 ? (Which literally has no mouth, indicating an inability to speak.)
Some people have conventional expressions for this purpose. Here’s one of them, homina, in today’s Mother Goose and Grimm:
(#1)
As a cartoon bonus, we get the (metonymic) conversion of an expression evincing some state of mind — homina evincing bewilderment, surprise, or shock to the point of speechlessness — to a measure noun denoting a degree of the evinced state of mind — homina as a unit of bewilderment etc. A special sort of nouning, generally available for interjections:
I give that experience three eeks / ughs / ewws / ouches / …
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Posted in Conversion, Emoji, Interjections, Linguistics in the comics, Metonymy, Movies and tv, Nouning, Semantics | Leave a Comment »
December 1, 2019
Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit on the first of the month. The Mother Goose and Grimm from 12/30, with a textbook attachment ambiguity. The Rhymes With Orange for today, with an updated version of a classic tongue twister. And the Bizarro for today, with a Mr. Potato Head wielding a terrible slang pun.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Formulaic language, Language and food, Language play, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Puns, Slang, Tongue twisters | 2 Comments »
November 28, 2019
A Thanksgiving cartoon by graphic designer Matt Reedy, requiring crucial background knowledge for understanding:
(#1) From Reedy’s pages of Den of Apathy prints (riffs on popular culture) on Etsy: WKRP “As God As My Witness, I Thought Turkeys Could Fly” (an 11×17 print is on sale there for $15)
A completely wordless cartoon (just the helicopter, the plummeting turkeys, the cityscape in the background) might not have worked, but “Cincinnati” is enough to make it the composition into a funny cartoon — if you know the background. “Thanksgiving” would work instead (with the same proviso). Or both: “Thanksgiving in Cincinnati”.
If you know Reedy’s title, you have even more of the story, but you still need to know how all these parts fit together, though you might reasonably infer that someone has dropped turkeys from a helicopter in the belief that they could fly, and that’s funny in itself. For the whole story, WKRP is crucial.
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Posted in Art, Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
November 27, 2019
Today’s Zippy is set in the Ghent neighborhood of Norfolk VA of a few years back, in a Do-Nut Dinette — whose name throws Zippy into a fit of onomatomania (aka repetitive phrase disorder) compounded with Spooner’s affliction (compulsive exchange of word elements in phrases):
(#1)
(Separately, there’s the use of dinette to refer to a diner, as a type of restaurant.)
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Posted in Diners, Language and food, Language play, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Spoonerisms, Word attraction | 2 Comments »
November 26, 2019
Today’s Zippy takes us to Alma AR, where Popeye rules with cans of spinach:
(#1)
This Popeye, who claimed to be the true Popeye and to be carved of wood (all others — especially the one in the cartoons — being mere dissemblers, pretenders, imitators), this grotesque figure, in fact of fibergass over papier-mâché, once stood tall in Alma AR, but has apparently wandered off, to be superseded by a harder, even more massive, Prince Popeye (invigorated by green iron but actually composed of bronze), the new lord of the Ozark Empire of Chenopodia.
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Posted in Art, Language and food, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »
