On the Comic Kingdom site on the 21st, “Tuesday’s Top Ten Comics on Language” (where language is understood broadly), with comments from the site.
Archive for the ‘Paralinguistics and kinesics’ Category
Ten language cartoons
February 25, 2017The audible asterisk
December 1, 2016Today’s Zits has Jeremy breaking out in asterisks, and they’re neither taboo avoidance characters nor stigmata of ungrammaticality:
What Jeremy’s mother perceives as a spoken asterisk is some complex of vocal quality, pitch. intensity, and timing that marks an expression as produced with some reservation, rather than whole-heartedly. Notably, in the last panel, Jeremy’s production of No corresponds to a Jeremy-mental Yes.
Monday: attention, language stereotypes
June 20, 2016Among today’s cartoons: a Calvin and Hobbes on the paradoxes of attention, and a One Big Happy on Italians behaving stereotypically, and stereotypes of the Italian language:
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Facework in gay porn
April 16, 2015On AZBlogX, a piece on “Titan faces”, about facial expressions in gay porn, focusing on two new releases from TitanMen, Friends with Benefits and Men at Work, and on the pornstars featured on the front covers of the DVDs: Hunter Marx, George Ce, Eric Nero, and Nick Prescott. (Note: all this material is wildly X-rated, showing (in fact, celebrating) full frontal nudity and raw man-man sex.
Then we notice that the covers of the DVDs (cropped here) show the actors smiling broadly:
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Friends with Benefits (Marx, Ce)
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Hard at Work (Nero, Prescott)
But as is customary in this genre, there are virtually no smiles in the films, and of course the men shown having sex with one another are unsmiling; instead, they are either intensely and seriously focused (“men at work”) in their sex acts or ecstatically abandoned to them.
