Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
November 20, 2019
(Later in this posting there are a couple of raunchy men’s underwear ads, and some cautiously worded references to men’s bodies and mansex, so some readers might want to exercise caution.)
Ruthie and Joe in the One Big Happy from 10/9:
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Three senses of (ir)regular in just four panels. All traceable ultimately to the Latin noun regula ‘rule’, with rule understood as in NOAD:
noun rule: 1 [a] one of a set of explicit or understood regulations or principles governing conduct within a particular activity or sphere: the rules of the game were understood. [b] a principle that operates within a particular sphere of knowledge, describing or prescribing what is possible or allowable: the rules of grammar. …
The range of senses of regular is impressively large, and illustrates a whole variety of mechanisms of semantic change; the three senses above are a microcosm of this greater world.
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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Clothing, Homosexuality, Inflection, Language change, Language in advertising, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Metonymy, Movies and tv, Underwear | 2 Comments »
November 17, 2019
The grim tale of the shoe elves who got wasted on ale and were baked into a bro pie by the evil shoemaker’s wife — I embroider a bit here — as condensed by Wayno and Piraro in their 11/7 Bizarro strip:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page. Two of these, the Pie of Opportunity and the Lost Loafer, figure in the actual content of the cartoon and will be duly attended to in a moment.)
The Bizarro Bros have folded a fair number of things into this cartoon, starting with the bro mindset and the slang nouns dude and bro, going on to Grimm’s Fairy Tales, in particular the tale of the elves and the shoemaker, and incorporating shoes from both Grimm and Bizarro, plus Greek pie, and I don’t mean spanakopita.
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Posted in Address terms, Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Slang | Leave a Comment »
November 17, 2019
From my 11/17/18 posting (exactly a year ago) “Teddy Bears’ Picnic Day”, with this Bizarro cartoon:
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I was moved to declare November 17th Teddy Bear Picnic Day …, but it turns out that (by whatever obscure mechanism these things happen) July 10th is already taken for this occasion … [however:] Elizabeth acceded to the English throne on November 17th, 1558, so that today is unquestionably Elizabeth I Accession Day. From a Princeton Triangle Club show from a great many decades ago, the anthem for today:
I’m Elizabeth the First / Say it if you durst / I’m a hell of a queen!
I’m now thinking of (Elizabeth’s) Accession Day as Hell of a Queen Day — a much more versatile concept.
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Homosexuality, Linguistics in the comics | 3 Comments »
November 16, 2019
Today’s Zippy, with a catfish buffet in the Toad Suck / Toadsuck AR area:
(#1) Buffet at the Toadsuck Catfish Inn (in Choctaw AR, on US 65 South), obviously of keen interest to Mr. (The) Toad
As is so often the case with establishments in Zippy strips, this one closed a few years ago — though alternatives, like Eat My Catfish in Conway, flourish in the area (which is prime catfish territory).
And, well, yes, there’s the name Toad Suck.
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Posted in Etymology, Etymythology, Language and animals, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Names | Leave a Comment »
November 14, 2019
The Wayno/Piraro Bizarro collabo from the 9th:
(#1) If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page. Meanwhile, the pie segments run through the flavors in the order named, clockwise from the pumpkin segment at the top.
Transpositional wordplay of an especially simple sort, involving a two-word expression, with X Y ~ Y X — in this case taking off from a conventional N + N compound, the metaphorical pie chart ‘chart resembling a pie’, and reversing the parts to yield the novel, and entertaining, (also metaphorical) compound chart pie ‘pie resembling a chart’.
The model expression pie chart refers to an object familiar in our culture, while the play expression chart pie refers to something novel and surprising: a pie made up of segments drawn from various different pies. Not a combination or mixed pie, like the familiar strawberry rhurbarb pie — a kind of hybrid pie — but instead a composite (‘made up of various parts or elements’ (NOAD) or chimerical pie, with distinct parts taken from different pies. (On chimeras, see my 11/13 posting “The chimera of Faneuil Hall”.)
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Posted in Chiasmus, Compounds, Errors, Figurative language, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Word exchanges / reversals | 1 Comment »
November 13, 2019
Yesterday’s Zippy takes us to the Boston waterfront and a piece of remarkable antic public art:
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A chimera — a composite of parts of a Boston lobster (those claws!) and parts of Mickey Mouse (all the rest, but especially the ears), let’s portmanteau him Lobstickey Mouse — who stood for a couple of years by Faneuil Hall on the Boston waterfront.
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Posted in Art, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus | 3 Comments »
November 6, 2019
Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro collabo goes (sort of) bilingual:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
The Cyrillic label hints at сардинкы (transliteration in Latin letters: sardinky/i) ‘little sardines’, with a hard sign Ъ added to allow an allusion to one of those odd symbols. Meanwhile, the title tsardines is a portmanteau, of tsar and sardines, referring to the five tsars of Russia packed like sardines into the tin.
(Yes, full appreciation of the cartoon requires assembling a fair amount of knowledge of several kinds, starting with sardines and their customary packaging.)
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Posted in Language and animals, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Russian, Understanding comics | 3 Comments »
November 3, 2019
Today’s Bizarro, with yet another unpacking of the initialism BYOB:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 12 in this strip! — see this Page.)
In the conventional initialism, BYOB stands for ‘bring your own bottle / booze / beer / beverage’, but here it’s ‘bring your OB’, where OB /o bi/ is short for — a clipping of — OB-GYN /o bi ǰi waj ɛn/. From NOAD:
noun ob-gyn: abbreviation [pronounced as an initialism] obstetrics and gynecology.
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Posted in Abbreviation, Clipping, Initialisms, Linguistics in the comics | 2 Comments »
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