Archive for the ‘Deixis’ Category

Where is your bathroom?

June 20, 2021

A comic gem from the very first episode (“Give Me a Ring Sometime”) of the American tv show Cheers (S1 E1 9/30/82).  An exchange (call it the D&C exchange) between the character Diane — at this point, merely a patron sitting in the bar Cheers — and Coach, the bartender on duty:

Diane to Coach: Excuse me. Where is your bathroom?

Coach in response : Uh, next to my bedroom.

The character Coach  turns out to be empathetic and warm-hearted, but regrettably slow and defective at calculating people’s intentions in speaking as they do. In this brief exchange with Diane, Coach is faced with several linked tasks in understanding deictic elements: the locative deixis in where, the person deixis in your.

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Posted in Context, Deixis, Metonymy, Movies and tv, Pragmatics | 1 Comment »

The elephant and plum

April 9, 2021

Not Frog and Peach, but Elephant and Plum, in a kid joke as told by Ruthie in the One Big Happy strip from 2/22 (in my comics feed on 3/21):

(#1)

Four things: kid jokes, of which the Elephant and Plum variant above is a particular clever example; the saying about elephants on which it depends; elephant jokes, of which the joke above is not the classic Elephant and Plum exemplar; and the ambiguity of “When did you laugh at it?”, which turns on the defining property of deictic elements like the interrogative when.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Childhood, Context, Deixis, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Semantics, Signs and symbols, Stock expressions | 4 Comments »

This is a pipe

May 2, 2020

No doubt inspired by my 4/29/20 posting “Magritte by Banksy”, Mark Mandel commented yesterday on my 8/19/17 posting “Magrittean disavowals”:

I have never — well, not for many years — considered the “Magrittean disavowal” in “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”

(#1)

at all paradoxical. It’s quite accurate. That is not a pipe, but rather a painting of a pipe.

It’s a shame that the technical term oxymoron has come to be used for a figure of speech involving an apparent contradiction, since etymologically it’s ‘sharp’ + ‘foolish’ and would be just the label we’d want for claims like Mark’s above: superficially clever, but deeply foolish.

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Posted in Art, Deixis, Metonymy, Paradoxes, Semantics, Words and things | 12 Comments »

Another Magrittean disavowal

April 2, 2018

Passed around on Facebook:

The 1929 Magritte original, often riffed on, went Ceci n’est pas une pipe ‘This is not a pipe’, a disavowal that sets up a contradiction between text and image. So here we have another Magrittean disavowal, as I’ve come to call the phenomenon; there’s a survey in my 8/19/17 posting “Magrittean disavowals”.

But they come in two species, and it’s not entirely clear which one the example above belongs to.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Deixis, Philosophy, Semantics | 1 Comment »