Today’s Zippy, with Griffy and Claude at odds on sources of information:
(#1)
The setting for all three panels is Neon Las Vegas in its heyday.
Archive for the ‘Slang’ Category
Neon Vegas
August 9, 2014The animal report
July 14, 2014In the NYT Book Review yesterday, a set of three reviews of quirky books about people and animals (elephants, a tawny owl, and the giant squid); and then today in the Daily Post (Palo Alto and Mid-Peninsula), the story “Another cougar reported” (by Angelo Ruggiero), which I took at first to be a silly story about sexually aggressive older women in the area but which turned out (of course) to be about mountain lions.
From the Zwicky diaspora
July 2, 2014Google Alerts has, well, alerted me to a story about a skateboarding cop, as has Horton Copperpot in e-mail. From a site provided by Copperpot, this story of June 25th, “Holy Kickflip Batman! Is that a Skateboarding Activist Cop?!”:
Meet Officer Joel Zwicky, “Skateboard cop,” of the Green Bay Police Department.
Zwicky is not your typical cop, for starters, instead of harassing skaters, he’s shredding right next to them.
Instead of lobbying for more strict laws on skateboarding, he’s fighting to get restrictions lifted; and he’s successful at it.
Earlier this year, Zwicky convinced the city of Green Bay to lift the skating ban on the 25 mile urban path known as Fox River Trail.
Zwicky is trying to change the stereotypes about skaters.
“Wanted to break that down and show people that skateboarders aren’t just punk kids causing trouble, they are all kinds of people in the community, and they’re even your police force,” Officer Zwicky told KHON 2 News.
queens
June 27, 2014Yesterday I reported on Fortnum & Mason’s use of queen in an advert in support of Gay Pride: “Proud to be the queens’ grocer”, with the plural possessive of the common noun queen, rather than the singular possessive of the proper noun Queen. Not everyone is entirely comfortable with this use of queen, seeing it as an offensive and demeaning slur. But the import of words, even slurs and other problematic vocabulary, depends crucially on context — on who’s using them, in what circumstances, for what purposes. Given that, you can read F&M’s queens’ as affectionate, in fact celebratory.
Apostrophes for the season
June 26, 2014On Facebook, Chris Hansen (looking forward to London Pride this weekend) reports this advert for Fortnum & Mason:
You wouldn’t expect the venerable F&M to get their apostrophes wrong (they are in fact Grocers to the Queen), and indeed this punctuational choice was entirely intentional.
For National Cartoonists Day
May 6, 2014This morning I discovered that yesterday was not only Cinco de Mayo, but also National Cartoonists Day. In honor of the occasion, three cartoons for today. Then some account of Cartoonists Day, which leads to the early newspaper cartoon featuring the Yellow Kid.
Three more for Friday
May 2, 2014Three cartoons today, on diverse topics: Calvin and Hobbes on explanations, Zits on means of communication (again), Bizarro on word play turning on ambiguity.
jerk-off
April 29, 2014From several sources recently, reports of the Great Northern Jerk-Off. No, nothing to do with masturbation; jerk-off here refers to a competition — like bake-off, a competition in food. (more…)
Dingburg bubbles
April 29, 2014Today’s Zippy:
(#1)
Fleer’s product was pink (hence the strip’s title, “In the pink”), apparently because that was the only coloring the inventor had on hand.
