Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
March 10, 2019
Cue from Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky yesterday, to a posting by Sandra Boynton on Facebook on the 7th:
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Day 5,347 of my quixotic project to entirely redraw my seven earliest board books. I’m doing this so that the line and colors will print better, and the layout is better balanced. I hope. (It’s really very fun, in a hyperfocused sort of way.)
EDZ recommended reading the comments, “for adorable linguistic content”. Indeed: on naming conventions and on the cot/caught merger, among other things.
And then a Boynton for Pi Day, coming up this week (on the 14th). With a celebratory pig for the occasion.
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Posted in Books, Holidays, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Rhyme, Variation | Leave a Comment »
March 4, 2019
Adventures in cross-dialect understanding in the One Big Happy strips of 2/1 and 2/2, both featuring Ruthie and Joe’s playmate James:
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Posted in Ambiguity, Dialects, Errors, Humor, Linguistics in the comics, Perception, Phonetics, Phonology, Pop culture, Usage attitudes, Variation | 1 Comment »
March 3, 2019
From various friends on Facebook who know that I’m interested in meta-comics, this 4/21/17 Imbattable strip by Pascal Jousselin, in an English translation:
(#1) Imbattable (‘Unbeatable’) is a bandit superhero in a yellow and black costume
Among Imbattable’s superpowers is his ability to break the walls of the cartoon’s panels and freely move between them. With the result that temporarily, in the fourth panel, the cat is in two places at once — a phenomenon that unsettles both the cat and the old lady.
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Posted in Comic conventions, Formulaic language, French, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Truncation | 1 Comment »
February 27, 2019
A series of three Calvin and Hobbes strips (re-run on the 25th, 26th, and 27th) in which Calvin undertakes to eat four boxes of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs to get a gee-whiz official beanie. A return to cartoonist Bill Watterson’s attacks on sugary breakfast cereals and the way they are marketed to children, especially through the stratagem of describing them as part of a healthful breakfast (in #2 below):
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Posted in Language and food, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics | 1 Comment »
February 27, 2019
Today’s Zits, featuring teenage boys goofing off, but in a specific way:
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Thereby presenting an exercise in cartoon understanding that’s a snap if you’re plugged into American pop culture of the past century, but is something of a challenge otherwise.
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Posted in Books, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Music, Phonetics, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
February 26, 2019
From linguist Avery Andrews on Facebook:
(#1) Avery: “My first reading of this was ‘Cthulhu Towers’, indicating that whatever the top-down constraints on my linguistic processing may be, real world plausibility has at best a delayed effect”
To judge from my own misreadings — some of them reported on in the Page on this blog with misreading postings — real-world plausibility has virtually no role in initial misreadings; we tend to notice these misreadings, in fact, because they are so bizarre.
On the other hand, they sometimes clearly reflect material currently or persistently on the hearer’s mind — if you’ve been thinking about cooking some pasta for dinner, Italian pasta names are likely to insert themselves into your peceptions; if you’re a gardener, plant names will come readily to mind, even if they’re preposterous; and of course it’s common to see sexual vocabulary where none was intended — but often they look like the welling-up of material from some deep chthonic place in memory, inexplicably in the context.
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Posted in Books, Context, Fiction, Linguistics in the comics, Memory, Misreadings, Pragmatics, Processing | Leave a Comment »
February 25, 2019
The title of this cartoon, which turned up yesterday in FB’s Our Bastard Language group:
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The captain is both a pirate and (as it turns out, once you figure out what the man intends to say) a grammar nazi, bent on correcting his crew’s inferior (as he sees it) English — hence the portmanteau grammar pirate. So the cartoon is, primarily, about (stereotypical) pirate talk (which will take us to the West Country of England), but also about peeving.
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Posted in Books, Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Peeving, Pop culture, Portmanteaus, Snowclonelet composites | Leave a Comment »
February 22, 2019
Revived on Facebook recently, this 2/20/12 Cyanide and Happiness cartoon by Jay A.:
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The first three panels are routine (but annoying): Character 1 produces an example of AccConjSubj (the non-standard Accusative Conjoined Subject me and Steve) and Character 2 reacts with hysterical peeving, becoming physically sick from experiencing the AccConjSubj.
But then we discover that we’re not in anything like the real world, where someone speaks and someone else hears what they say, but instead in the Land of Supertitles, where someone produces a banner with writing on it and someone else reads it. That has to be what’s going on — since otherwise how could Chr2 know how Chr1 was spelling what they said? YOUR instead of YOU’RE, ALLERGYS insead of ALLERGIES, AFFECT instead of EFFECT, THEIR instead of THEY’RE, ITS instead of IT’S — they’re all homophones, so how could Chr2 know that Chr1 was spelling them wrong? UNLESS CHR2 COULD READ WHAT CHR1 WAS SAYING.
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Posted in Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Peeving, Phonetics, Pronoun case, Sociolinguistics, Syntax, Usage attitudes | 3 Comments »
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