Two Calvin and Hobbes cartoons recently — yesterday and today (originally from 4/8 and 4/9/91) — in my comics feed, in which Calvin takes on a title (the epithet the Bold) and adopts illeism (referring to himself in the third person):
(#1)
(#2)
Yes, it’s all about linguistics.
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)
Most of this posting is in effect a guest column by Ben Yagoda: a re-posting of a thoughtful column of his from, omigod, 2017, from the Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog on language and writing in academe, Lingua Franca, which was discontinued in (apparently) December 2018, and is currently inaccessible.
I’d saved Ben’s column because it dealt with one of my long-term interests, address terms — there’s a Page on this blog with an annotated inventory of my postings on address terms — but now that you can’t get to it on-line, I think it’s important to give it an audience, even without further commentary from me.
From 11/13/17, Yagoda on Last-Naming Professors:
The following cartoon, in French and unattributed, has been making its way around Facebook in the last few days:
(#1) “How do you [polite] feel this week?” – “Much better.”
Therapist and patient, both cowering in the anxiety of persecution. But this week is better. Much better.
Presumably, it’s being passed around as a pointed commentary on the fix we are all in currently. Even better is appalling.
It doesn’t take a keen eye to see that #1 is a rip-off of a Bizarro cartoon: the drawing style, the content (the Psychiatrist meme is a Bizarro evergreen favorite), the two odd Dan Piraro symbols. And so it is, from 2/15/11, almost a decade ago.
The grim tale of the shoe elves who got wasted on ale and were baked into a bro pie by the evil shoemaker’s wife — I embroider a bit here — as condensed by Wayno and Piraro in their 11/7 Bizarro strip:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page. Two of these, the Pie of Opportunity and the Lost Loafer, figure in the actual content of the cartoon and will be duly attended to in a moment.)
The Bizarro Bros have folded a fair number of things into this cartoon, starting with the bro mindset and the slang nouns dude and bro, going on to Grimm’s Fairy Tales, in particular the tale of the elves and the shoemaker, and incorporating shoes from both Grimm and Bizarro, plus Greek pie, and I don’t mean spanakopita.
(Men’s bodies, clicks, mansex, dactyls, homowear, eggcorns, street talk, and more. Not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
The Daily Jocks mailing of the 15th, with a studiedly homo-smouldering ad for crop tops from the fetish-wear company Barcode Berlin. Plus a foul derangement of (heavily enjambed) dactyls as a caption.
(#1)
Kiko the crop-top kid,
Impudent pussy boy,
Butch faggy target for
Amorous arrows — amazing for festivals,
Parties with gangbangers,
Mid-drifting kikis with
Quatrains of dactyls
On the Language Nerd Facebook page yesterday, this playfully framed, but seriously intended, flowchart, “Your guide to being polite in French”, for choosing between the 2sg pronouns tu (‘familiar’) and vous (‘polite’) in current French — a bow to the treatment of T and V pronouns in Brown & Gilman 1960:
(#1)
The Palo Alto Medical Foundation periodically revises the format for its on-line statements, including after visit summaries to its physicians and labs. As far as I can tell, every such software upgrade arrives with bugs, sometimes spectacular ones; this is, after, the way of software the world over.
So it was with recent after visit summaries, in which my name at the top was given as
Dr. Zwicky M. Zwicky
I have an idea about how this might have come about. Probably not verifable, since it involves decisions by two different people, neither of whom could easily be identified.
Today’s Zippy has Mr. the Toad recruiting a Pinhead named Foswelch — Toad uses the name as an address term in every panel of the strip except the last — as a Formstone siding salesman in Baltimore:
(#1)
There’s the name Foswelch, another in a series of F-initial family names that Bill Griffith seems to be fond of. And the combination of siding and Baltimore — a natural for Formstone, but also evoking the movie Tin Men.
