Archive for the ‘Toys and games’ Category
November 26, 2018
Tennis, anyone? Croquet, monsieur? Croquette, madame?
I begin in medias res, with croquet monsieur, as used in this announcement on the specials board recently at the King’s College Cambridge servery:
(#1) (photo by Bert Vaux, of King’s, posted on Facebook today)
The staffer who made up the board was presumably unfamiliar with the croque part of the food name croque-monsieur, so they went with the closest thing they knew: croquet. (Well, it was all French to them.) Go With What You Know is the eggcorning strategy of Ruthie in the cartoon One Big Happy, reported on regularly in this blog.Here it is in an adult variant.
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Posted in Eggcorns, Etymology, Language and food, Names, Toys and games | Leave a Comment »
October 15, 2018
(Bonus content: a news bulletin for penises, with two items.)
Today’s Wayno/Piraro combo:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
Simultaneously a boy about to bash a rainbow donkey piñata with a bat — a baseball bat, rather than the usual piñata-specific stick or bat (illustrated below) — and a military officer about to execute a prisoner by firing squad. So both in the everyday world and in a metaphorical world systematically mapped onto the everyday world.
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Posted in Comic conventions, Humor, Idioms, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Phallicity, Rainbow, Toys and games | 1 Comment »
June 29, 2018
A gift today from Maggie Ainsworth-Darnell: a great big poster version of this steamy photo, folded up in a recent release of the game Cards Against Humanity:
(#1) Kiss 2017 – Paul Octavious x Cards Against Humanity
Maggie decided immediately that this had to go to me; she knows my tastes — it’s not just a kiss, but a same-sex kiss, in fact between men, and, for lagniappe, interracial, and also a male recasting of a lesbian kiss in a famous 2002 poster by UK photographer Tanya Chalkin (1971-2018):
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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Male art, Portmanteaus, Puns, Toys and games | 1 Comment »
May 18, 2018
In today’s Dilbert, Catbert persecutes Dilbert (as Alice looks on):
(#1)
N + N compounds are notorious for the wide range of interpretations available for them: what’s the semantic relationship between head N2 and modifier N1? As above, where the choice is between ‘ref(N2) relieves, reduces ref(N1)’ (the reading for a conventionalized compound stress ball and many others, like headache pill) and ‘ref(N2) causes ref(N1)’ (as in death ray) — where for an expression X, ref(X) is the referent of X.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Semantics, Subsectivity, Toys and games | Leave a Comment »
April 24, 2018
Yesterday’s Zippy had a nutjob in a diner ranting:
Are you trying to lure me into a lexicographical, self-contradicting black hole of word play so heinous it defies logic?
And today, embedded within a thick matrix of allusions pointing in many directions:
a lexicographical, self-contradicting vortex so heinous, it defies Robert Mueller
(#1)
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Posted in Idioms, Language and food, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Parody, Pop culture, Quotations, Toys and games | Leave a Comment »
April 10, 2018
(Cartoons, language play, food, and humor, but also plain discussion of some sexual practices, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Cartoons come to me via friends on Facebook all the time, but only occasionally are they directed to me specifically, because I would especially enjoy them. Two of them yesterday, however, of very different character (one sweetly silly, one sophomorically crude): a Dave Coverly Speed Bump cartoon from 11/10/10 “Boomeringue” (passed on by Chris Hansen); and a Charlie Higson Heck If I Know comic from 4/7/18 “A Truck” (passed on by Michael Palmer):
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Posted in Humor, Language and food, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Toys and games | 1 Comment »
