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.
Archive for the ‘Address terms’ Category
Fenwich, come here, I need you
May 28, 2018Fenwick the semi-generic
May 14, 2018Just posted on this blog, this Zippy:
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Zippy-God as the psychiatrist, a very Zippy-like generic Pinhead as the patient; he’s given the name Fenwick in the third panel. The artist is fond of Fenwick.
Mistered and Ma’amed
October 24, 2017Today’s Zits:
Jeremy is mistered for the first time, Connie recalls being ma’amed for the first time.
The topic here is vocative (vs. referential) expressions, in particular the subtype of calls (vs. addresses), a domain in which it’s well-known that there are very substantial differences between the subtypes — between the expressions usable in each subtype and the social meanings they convey.
Terms of endearment
August 27, 2017Recently in my comics feed, a Calvin and Hobbes re-run with endearments:
pooty pie, bitsy pookums, snoogy woogy — from Wiktionary:
term of endearment: a word, phrase, or nickname used as a term of address expressing affection (synonym: endearment)
On offer at Daily Jocks
July 19, 2017(Men’s bodies, underwear, snarky captions, and some slang.)
A recent offer from Daily Jocks, SUP BRO t-shirts from the Australian company Supawear:
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That’s my shirt bro
It comes from A U
I’m Buster Brown
Look for me down there too
Memorial Saturday 4
May 27, 2017Four 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).
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.
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.
Poppin’ Fresh in a pink dress
January 22, 2017(It starts with dough and cross-dressing and eventually touches on several sexy topics. So: definitely racy, but probably not enough to frighten the horses in the street.)
Today’s Rhymes With Orange portrays the kinky side of the Pillsbury Doughboy, Poppin’ Fresh (the advertising icon and mascot of the Pillsbury Company):
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The Doughboy cross-dressing in an adorable pink skirt — a fluted cupcake liner, from the set on the kitchen counter.
Now: some remarks on cupcakes; a note on sexual undercurrents in the Poppin’ Fresh ads; and extensive discussion of sentient, speaking figures (often anthropomorphic, as here) in advertising, cartoons, or fictions of other kinds, figures that are in fact foodstuffs.