Sociocultural conventions | Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Archive for the ‘Sociocultural conventions’ Category

Skyparty

August 21, 2025

In the latest (8/25/25) New Yorker, a Jeremy Nguyen cartoon in which some construction workers party in the sky:

(#1) A play on the well-known “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” photo originally taken in New York in 1932 (which I have labeled Skylunch 1; it was followed by a series of Skylunch variants)

Nguyen has 8 men, grouped 2, 2, 2, 1, 1; they are working-class guys in casual dress (caps rather than hard hats, no harnesses), standing (rather than sitting) around with simple party fare (rather than lunch boxes) in their hands. What guy #3 finds remarkable is not that they are standing on a girder suspended far above the city streets, but that they’re getting their little party in what is for them their lunch spot. This is elephantlessness: missing the elephant — in this case, the floating girder — in the situation.

(more…)

Posted in Clothing, Humor, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Photography, Social class, Social life, Sociocultural conventions, Understanding comics | 3 Comments »

Reading signs

July 27, 2025

Rina Piccolo’s Rhymes With Orange strip of 7/21 presents us with a dog that can read — not just converting text to sound (speaking written or printed matter aloud), but, crucially for the strip, converting text to meaning (‘looking at and comprehending the meaning of written or printed matter by mentally interpreting the characters or symbols of which it is composed’ (a definition adapted from NOAD)):

(#1) Panel 1: happy dog, in a state of innocence; panel 2, where all the action happens: dog sees sign, recognizes that it is a sign, reads it, understands that the sign says that its reader should beware of some dog in the sign’s surroundings (specifically, in the yard the sign is posted in), and recognizes that it is a dog in that yard, consequently concluding that it is the dog the sign’s reader is supposed to beware of, and unpacks the meaning of imperative beware as a warning, about the potential danger of this dog, therefore concluding that it has a reputation as a dangerous animal; panel 3, dog exhibits ferocity fitting to its reputation, by growling at passers-by

So that is one astoundingly clever dog. with an understanding of English and a ton of culture-specific information (about keeping dogs as pets and confining them in enclosed yards, about issuing warnings, and about the interpretation of material printed on signs, not to mention self-recognition, the knowledge that he is a dog). Why, you might think that dog was human — an American, in fact.

Now, some earlier postings (from 2015 and 2021), and notes from 2018 for one that never got posted, because it had started to branch into an essay on everything there is to say about signage– so here you’ll get the notes.

(more…)

Posted in Context, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Reading, Signage, Sociocultural conventions, Speech acts, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

In the menswear ROJ

May 15, 2022

As in yesterday’s posting “Romper buddies”, about an ad for Romperjacks: not RAJ the land of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Andhra Pradesh, but ROJ the land of rompers, overalls, and jumpsuits. With a photo gallery. To whet your interest, two Romperjacks items:

(#1) The floridly beautiful Jungle Print romper

(#2) The elegant White Chateaux romper

(more…)

Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Clothing, Fashion, Gender and sexuality, Lexical semantics, Masculinity, Play, Social class, Sociocultural conventions | Leave a Comment »

Learning culture

January 28, 2021

The One Big Happy cartoon from 1/6, recently up in my comics feed:

Ruthie and Joe are engaged in picking up elements of culture — American commercial culture, to be specific — beginning this particular bit of learning by reproducing material they’ve heard on tv, without much appreciation for what it means.

This is in line with kids’ learning of other bits of culture — song lyrics, joke routines, patterns of swearing and insulting, greeting and leave-taking routines, and much much more. At the same time that kids are picking up new words at a great rate, they are also incorporating those words into ways of performing the verbal bits of social life. (Meanwhile, they’re learning gestures, facial expressions, the physical elements of dances, games, and sports, and the rest of a vast universe of nonverbal behavior, which then has to be coordinated with verbal behavior.)

And much of this has to be picked up “on the fly”, from observing what people around you do, without being explicitly instructed — a fact that guarantees that their first efforts at performing these bits of culture will be decidedly imperfect and will have to be honed by practice.

(more…)

Posted in Child language, Childhood, Linguistics in the comics, Sociocultural conventions | 2 Comments »

wingman, winger

September 3, 2020

In a NYT Magazine piece on Grabpussy Jr., an arresting mid-page teaser quote:

I searched my mental banks for relevant senses of winger, working my way through wingman first, eventually discovering that the intended sense was the one I came to last. You really have to have the context: in particular, who is speaking, for what purposes.

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Gender and sexuality, Language and sports, Language in politics, Sociocultural conventions | 2 Comments »

The three Ds: debased, degraded, and decadent

August 16, 2020

(Well, it’s about lexical semantics and the conventions of social life, but there will be, right at the outset, dips into references to mansex in very plain language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

It started with my 12/29/19 posting “The time of mildly debasing oneself”, about one of Nathan W. Pyle’s weirdly quirky Strange Planet cartoons looking forward to New Year’s Day:

(#1) “Until then I will mildly debase myself” — “To maximize contrast”

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Books, Homosexuality, Lexical semantics, Scalarity, Sociocultural conventions | 1 Comment »

Joe and the cucumber sandwiches

April 30, 2020

Today’s Rhymes With Orange cartoon, “Tea Time”:

(#1)

You are expected to recognize, from the title and from the drawing (showing a teapot, teacups, sugar bowl, and 3-tiered tray of fingerfood) that this depicts an afternoon tea — not tea plants in the afternoon, or merely the beverage tea taken in the afternoon, but (from NOAD):

noun tea: … 3 chiefly British a light afternoon meal consisting typically of tea to drink, sandwiches, and cakes.

But that won’t help you with the text, in which one tea sandwich asks of another (identified as female) why the latter brought Joe — Joe clearly referring to the one discordant element in the drawing, who appears to be a hamburger bun overstuffed with a meat filling, some of which has spilled out onto the table. Messy, messy Joe, who “just can’t pull himself together”.

Clearly, that one line, in conjunction with Joe’s appearance, is somehow the crux of the joke. But how?

For this, you have to know a bit about vernacular American foodstuffs, in particular the sandwich known as a sloppy joe. So it’s a pun on the name — and also, it turns out, a gender joke.

(more…)

Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Puns, Sociocultural conventions, Understanding comics | 2 Comments »

NO PENGUINS

December 4, 2019

A generic penguin ban sign (sold on Amazon, a CD Visionary no-penguins button):

(#1) What’s banned? Spheniscid birds. Why? Who knows. (They smell. They steal fish. They get underfoot. Whatever.)

and a ban — in a list of prohibitions against public vice or indecency — on the door of Loretta’s Authentic Pralines on N. Rampart St. in New Orleans (photo from the TripAdvisor South Africa site):

(#2) What’s banned? Who knows. Why? Because they’re a vice (like drinking or smoking) or are indecent (like profanity or nudity), presumably the latter.