Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm:
Ralph understands what symbols are, and even that in this context only symbols that aren’t alphanumerics count, but he hasn’t figured out that obscenicons are a conventional subset of these symbols.
Background on this blog in “The obscenicons vs. the grawlixes” of 8/1/10. Obscenicons are frequently discussed (as well as used) in cartoons; among the many examples on Language Log and this blog are a Zits and a Bizarro in this posting.
Now at the Jewish Museum in New York (through September 21st), an exhibition of Mel Bochner‘s recent conceptual art. From the NYT on May 2nd, in “Secret Power of Synonyms: Mel Bochner Turns Up the Volume in ‘Strong Language’ ” by Ken Johnson:
Words have been the subjects and primary constituents of the enigmatic yet acerbically provocative paintings Mel Bochner has been creating over the past 12 years. “Mel Bochner: Strong Language,” an elegantly produced exhibition at the Jewish Museum, gives them their due and traces their roots back to text-based works that Mr. Bochner created in the ’60s and early ’70s, when he was one of New York’s pre-eminent Conceptual artists.
Three cartoons this morning: a notably weird Zippy about comics, a Dilbert on search terms, and a Zits on passwords (and obscenicons):
Maybe I’m just easily amused today, but three cartoons caught my eye: a Zippy, a Rhymes With Orange, and a Pearls Before Swine:
(#1)
(#2)
(#3)
A Bent Pinky cartoon by Scott Metzger, sent to me by Tom Limoncelli:
(#1)
A play on The Cat in the Hat, with the nice final rhyme:
… a cake and a cup / … shut the fuck up!
(but with fuck disguised by obscenicons).
Yesterday’s Dilbert:
The pointy-headed boss clearly has no clue about what Dilbert is talking about (which is an actual issue in programming), and Dilbert responds with an (implicit) blunt criticism of managers who don’t understand what the people they manage do.
Today’s Bizarro, with more puns:
The second pun turns on word division (compare ice cream vs. I scream), with the extra twist that the indefinite article a(n) is usually attached to the following word and pronounced as a unit with it — so than the [n] of an is usually syllabified with the following word, making an ice and a nice phonetically identical.
The third plays on the convention of using obscenicons to represent swearwords.
Of course, all three depend on cultural knowledge: among other things, that Brussels is in Belgium, that Brussels sprouts are a vegetable, that the man in the first panel is planting something, and that the scene and his costume suggest Belgium (what makes it preposterous is that he’s planting pig snouts); that the costumes and dwellings in the second panel are appropriate for Eskimos and that Eskimos live in cold, snowy climates; and that Men’s Wearhouse (itself a pun) is the name of a men’s clothing store.
Today’s Rhymes With Orange:
Effluency, a portmanteau of effluent and fluency, is a nice touch (NOAD2 on effluent: ‘liquid waste or sewage discharched into a river or the sea’) — a genuinely dirty word. Oh, @*#☆! indeed.
The New York Times doesn’t do editorial cartoons, but on Sundays, it reproduces a collection of them from other papers. Two from this Sunday (January 16): one, by Patrick Chappatte in the International Herald Tribune, alluding (alarmingly) to the Tucson shootings; and the other, by John Cole in the Scranton Times Tribune, with playful taboo avoidance, alluding to provocative political rhetoric.
Obscenicons began as a device in the comics, and cartoons return to them again and again in an assortment of meta-referential ways, using them not merely for ostentatious concealment of taboo vocabulary, but also in play about them. Two recent examples, from Zits and Bizarro:
Jeremy’s cursing is conveyed by some standard obscenicons, plus an assortment of dire symbols, thus harking back to the early days of obscenicons in the comics, before they became largely conventionalized.
(Note the use of adult here, as in adult movies and adult book store.)
Then we have the conceit that the whole spoken taboo word is represented by a sequence of obscenicons (@*%&!), but can be broken down into its separate glyphs, just as, say, SHIT represents a spoken word and also a sequence of letters.