Four recent cartoons in my feed that have to do with language: Mother Goose and Grimm (attachment ambiguity), Zits (greetings), Bizarro (labeling a bat(h)room), xkcd (knowledge about the referents of names).
Archive for the ‘Pragmatics’ Category
Memorial Saturday 4
May 27, 2017Is that a Paschal Peep in your pouch?
April 24, 2017From Chris Hansen on Facebook, a late entry in this year’s Easter Peepstakes: a model who dreamt he played with yellow Peeps in his Aronik swimwear:
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About the company, its products, its models, its symbol, and its name
Chub and chums in the morning
April 17, 2017Yesterday’s morning name was chub (the name of a fish), which led me to the rest of the bilabial-final family: chum, chump, and chup. (And that led to the velar-final family chug, Chung, chunk, chuck, but I won’t pursue that one here.) As it is, the bilabials will lead us into many surprising places, including the Hardy Boys books, eyewear retainers, Australian dog food, gay slurs, and hunky underwear models.
hockey puck
April 11, 2017From the Bloomberg site on 4/6/17, a death notice: “Don Rickles, Comedian Who Turned Insults Into Art, Dies at 90”, by Laurence Arnold, which notes:
“The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang credits Rickles, circa 1963, with repurposing ‘hockey puck’ to mean ‘a stupid or useless person.’”
There’s some question about when Rickles first used the insult to address someone, but no one seems to have asked
🏒Why hockey puck?🏒
Plus ça change
April 7, 2017A Doonesbury cartoon reprinted in Doonesbury Dossier: The Reagan Years (1984):
Reproduced here without political comment. But one brief linguistic note.
Ruthie copes
March 28, 2017Two recent One Big Happy strips, featuring Ruthie: the sign strip and the ladder strip
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Sexting with emoji
March 19, 2017(Talk of sexual bodyparts and sexual acts, but with symbols rather than pictures of carnal reality.)
From the NYT‘s Fashion & Style section on the 14th, “Gaymoji: A New Language for That Search” by Guy Trebay, with the hot gay news from West Hollywood CA:
You don’t need a degree in semiotics to read meaning into an eggplant balanced on a ruler or peach with an old-fashioned telephone receiver on top. That the former is the universally recognized internet symbol for a large male member and the latter visual shorthand for a booty call is something most any 16-year-old could all too readily explain. [Maybe most any 16-year-old, but not a lot of older people; see below.]
As with most else in our culture, demographics define the future, particularly those describing an age cohort born with a smartphone in hand. That, at least, is the calculation being made by Grindr, the successful gay meeting app with ambitions to overhaul itself as an internet commons for a generation of young lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and their pals.
And so, starting this week, Grindr will offer to users a set of trademarked emoji, called Gaymoji — 500 icons that function as visual shorthand for terms and acts and states of being that seem funnier, breezier and less freighted with complication when rendered in cartoon form in place of words.
One of the new emoji, an image of semen / ejaculăte — jizz, spooge, cum, cream, spunk, etc.:
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bombogenesis
March 12, 2017The weather forecast for the US Northeast is dire, calling for a fierce late winter storm, with plenty of snow. Map from the Northeast Weather site on Facebook (link from Eleanor Houck, who lives in the Reading area in southeastern Pennsylvania, right in the red zone):
In some of the forecasts, Eleanor came across the colorful technical term bombogenesis, suggesting a “weather bomb”. New to her, and to me, but it’s been around for a while.
