… in today’s comics feed, both connecting to earlier postings on this blog: a Rhymes With Orange on an ambiguity in the verbing to dust; and a Zippy on Magritte’s painting The Son of Man.
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Archive for the ‘Verbing’ Category
Two cartoons on the 30th
January 30, 2021
Buzz me, baby
March 19, 2020Today’s Calvin and Hobbes re-run strip, on Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs (CFSBs), which offer “100% of the daily recommended allowance of caffeine”:
(#1) Just in case you had a fleeting moment of wondering about it, there is no caffeine RDA (recommended dietary allowance — recommended by the US National Research Council); the RDAs are for nutrients, and caffeine is not a nutrient
C&H Sugar Bomb strips. Hummingbird metabolism. The getting-high sense of the noun buzz and its verbing. The near-instant buzz of concentrated caffeine. Adalbert Stifter’s 1845 novella Bergkristall.
Brenda the Civil Disobedience Penguin
May 25, 2019From ace penguin-spotter Martin Mulligan, a link to First Dog on the Moon cartoons by Guardian Australia’s Andrew Marlton (a list of his cartoons is available here): dense but wry text on political issues, often featuring the character Brenda the Civil Disobedience Penguin, as in this 5/8/19 strip “Throwing eggs is satisfying but is it right? Quite possibly”:
Where are you going with that?
April 30, 2019The One Big Happy from 4/3, recently in my comics feed: the tough neighborhood kid James and his sledgehammer:
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What I hear in the first panel is an echo of a quotation with an ax, not a sledgehammer:
‘Where’s Papa going with that axe?’ said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
One of the great first lines in English literature, just grips you right off, does E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web.
bait and tackle
December 27, 2018A coordination of two nouns, conventionally paired in bait & tackle shop, referring to a store that provides supplies for sport fishermen. Like this place in Benicia CA:
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And elaborately played on in the Bizarro from December 23rd:
Yoo-hoo, Aargau!
December 15, 2018It started at the Peninsula Creamery in Palo Alto at breakfast (with Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky) this morning, quickly led to a chocolate beverage from northern New Jersey (and to manner-of-speaking verbs) and after a whirlwind worldwide beverage tour ended up with an echt-Swiss dairy soft drink from Canton Aargau, Switzerland (up north, on the flatlands near the Rhine).
The impetus for all this, a vintage advertising poster on the wall at the Creamery:
(#1) ASK FOR IT by NAME: Yoo-hoo
Arousing the beast
November 7, 2018In today’s comics feed, a One Big Happy that requires a double dose of pop-cultural moon knowledge to understand:
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A defiant gesture, a bit of lycanthropic folklore.
PUMP!ing it up
October 17, 2018(Homowear: male models in underwear, displaying their bodies homoerotically, with archly queer ad copy. Not X-rated, but not to everyone’s taste.)
The Daily Jocks ad for PUMP! underwear from the 15th:
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Underwear model as sculptural form. Mahogany Man.
Chic peas and more
October 13, 2018The fall special at Dan Gordon’s (on Emerson St. in Palo Alto), as it first appeared on the menu, about a month ago:
Summer Stew $16.95
smoked pork / cippolini onions / chic peas / prunes / red rice
(with the very notable spelling chic peas and with the misspelling cippolini for cipollini). But now the ingredients list reads:
smoked pork / cippolini onions / chickpeas / dehydrated plums / red rice
(with the notable dehydrated plums). Actually, all four ingredients have linguistic interest.
Death by verbing
July 23, 2018From Facebook friends, this distressing recent Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, featuring a malevolently uberpeeving personification of the English language:
