Yesterday’s wry Rhymes With Orange strip, wordless and spare-looking, but packed with tons of meaning on two fronts, the dairy and the managerial; meanwhile, it presents a challenging exercise in cartoon understanding.
(#1) If you see that there’s something sweetly funny about a dairy cow managing a business, well, that will do — but the pleasure of the cartoon is in the details
Posted in Abbreviation, Initialisms, Language and animals, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Mascots, Names, Nicknames, Puns, Signs and symbols, Toys and games, Understanding comics | 14 Comments »
(This has turned out to be quite a large meze, but it’s only about one idiomatic slang expression. Well, men and masculinity come into the thing, and you know what can happen then.)
Reflecting a couple days ago on my Princeton days (1958-62) and the tangle of the attitudes of the (all-male) students at the time towards (among things) masculinity, male affiliation (as systematized in a pervasive system of male bands, the eating clubs of the time), women, homosexuals, race, and social class. The topic is vast, also deeply distressing to me personally, and I suspect that I’ll never manage to write about the bad parts of it in any detail — note: there were some stunningly good parts — but in all of that I retrieved one lexical item of some sociolinguistic interest (and entertainment value), one slang nugget: the idiomatic N1 + N2 compound noun face man / faceman / face-man.
A common noun frequently used among my friends, which was then also deployed as a proper noun nicknaming one of our classmates, a young man notable for his facial male beauty: everybody had to have a nickname (mine was Zot, for the Z of my name and the cartoon anteater), so we called him Face Man because he was a face man.
Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Common vs. proper, Faces, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Idioms, Innovations, Language and gender, Lexicography, Masculinity, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Music, Nicknames, Semantics of compounds, Slang | Leave a Comment »
The 3/14 Zippy strip shows Claude and Griffy (and eventually Zippy too) caught up in what seems to be affixoid attraction (similar to word attraction), an irrational appreciation of or enthusiasm for a particular word-part — in this case, the word-final element –o (whatever its source might be):
(#1) All of the panels except the fourth are framed as two-person exchanges, in which the second is a response to the first: offering a competing alternative (panel 1), trading insults (panels 2 and 3), or expressing appreciation (panel 5)
Posted in Abbreviation, Address terms, Linguistics in the comics, Morphology, Names, Nicknames, Playful morphology, Trade names, Word attraction | 1 Comment »
Two One Big Happy cartoons recently in my comics feed. Originally from 1/29, a strip in which Ruthie misunderstands “Randi with an “I””, taking it to be “Randi with an eye”. And originally from 1/25, a Sunday strip in which Ruthie misunderstands “pole dance”, taking it to be “Pole dance”.
Posted in Ambiguity, Dance, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Nicknames, Semantics of compounds | Leave a Comment »
Today’s Zippy toon, at Zip’s diner in Dayville CT, with Zippy spreading his love for taco sauce:
(#1)
At least the eighth appearance of Zip’s in Zippy.
Posted in Diners, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Nicknames | Leave a Comment »
… in a One Big Happy cartoon (in auditorium) and in the title of a 1998 movie (the nickname Paulie): in American English, unrounded [ɑ] for rounded [ɔ], collapsing the distinction between the phonemes /a/ in cot and /ɔ/ in caught.
(#1) Discomfort in the low back region: Polly on the left, Paulie on the right
Posted in Eggcorns, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Names, Nicknames, Phonetics, Phonology, Taboo language and slurs, Toys and games | 2 Comments »
(Warning: scattered amidst the daffodils, substantial allusions to some technical linguistics)
From John Wells, a greeting for the day, March 1st:
(#1) Dydd Gŵyl Dewi hapus! ‘Happy St David’s Day!’ (word by word: ‘Day Festival Davy happy’)
Posted in Holidays, Language and plants, Morphophonology, Nicknames, Spelling, Welsh | 7 Comments »
In today’s comics feed, the 9/22 One Big Happy, in which Joe wrestles with people named /lɪl/:
(#1)
(And then there’s Li’l Abner.)
Posted in Abbreviation, Ambiguity, Linguistics in the comics, Nicknames | 1 Comment »
That’s what I heard in a Taco Bell television commercial on Tuesday the 24th. I visualized insects with tortilla chip wings. Decidedly odd: was Taco Bell being besiged by these nacho flies, and, if so, why were they telling us about it?
Then I realized it must be nacho fries; my confusion stemmed in part from the fact that I’d never heard of nacho fries — I don’t keep up with the fast-food business — and though I know what nachos are, I had no clear idea of what something called nacho fries would be would be like.
Posted in Errors, Language and food, Mishearings, Nicknames, Subsectivity | 3 Comments »
There’s Fenwick, and then there’s Fenwich, a Zippy name to conjure with: used as a narrative semi-generic address term, and in explicit discussions of names and their uses.
Posted in Address terms, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Names, Nicknames | Leave a Comment »
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