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You should really look at the text

June 10, 2016

… or maybe you think that any publicity is good publicity — if you are the author of this e-mail that came to me yesterday:

Dear Arnold Zwicky, We would humbly request that you consider adding [site X] as a dating site link on your page [1/20/12, “Christians”]:

We are the largest free Christian dating site in the world and have been around since 2007. We are currently working hard on our memberships and have marketed the latest versions of our Google Play Android app and iOS app to the Christian community. Thank you for your consideration. God Bless, David

Snarl.

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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Language and religion, Lexical semantics, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Gerard Hoffnung

May 26, 2016

Like Thurber, Sendak, Briggs, and some others I’ve written about, another cartoonist / illustrator not generally accounted to be a Real Artist (perhaps at best a “graphic artist” like Bechdel) — especially since his work is funny, and meant to be. But he was a delight, the clear standout in the specialized field of cartoonists / illustrators / humorists who focus on the world of music. The occasion is my unearthing my copy of The Hoffnung Symphony Orchestra (originally published in 1955, reprinted in 1984), with its enormously enjoyable combination of hilarious exaggerated drawings of symphony musicians at work and preposterous invented instruments. A third vein of humor comes in some other books of his, especially Musical Chairs of 1958, with its hybrid concoctions of animal plus instrument (a cat playing on its whiskers as a violin, for example).

Seven examples follow. I had to exercise severe forbearance to keep from swamping you with Hoffnungiana.

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Posted in Books, Linguistics in the comics, Portmanteaus, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Urban gardening in Dingburg

May 22, 2016

Sunday silliness: today’s Zippy, which tickled my fancy:

The conceit is that you can cultivate inanimate artifacts, especially ones with interesting names: Post-Its, toner cartridges, glue sticks, shrink wrap, kneaded erasers (aka putty rubber), wiggly heads for Eve dolls, AAA batteries, styrofoam packing peanuts — all can be planted and will multiply, given a nice loamy soil (a fertile soil containing clay, sand, and humus) and applications of Gatorade and Jolt Cola.

I have to admit that the idea of harvesting a bumper crop of styrofoam packing peanuts horrifies me.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

A slow meme

May 22, 2016

Today’s Rhymes With Orange plays on the proverbial slowness of snails:

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Slow snails are such a recurrent theme in cartoons that they can be seen to constitute a cartoon meme.

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Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Brill me tomorrow, Zippy

May 14, 2016

Today’s Zippy takes us to an alternative (olfactory porcine) version of 1619 Broadway (at 49th St.) in NYC, where Goffni and Knig cranked out their hits:

Yes, another Zippy burlesque.

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Music, Parody, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

The news for (big) penises

May 1, 2016

(The header tells the story. The X-rated images are on AZBlogX today, in “It was a dark and stocky cock” (here) and “Patrick Fillion” (here). But there will be some plain talk in this posting, so it’s not for kids or the sexually modest.)

The first AZBlogX posting has an item of male photography, of a man with an excellent furry body and a thick, stocky cock. The second is about gay cartoonist Patrick Fillion and his very X-rated one-panel art/illustrations featuring truly outsized cocks (plus ample butts and a variety of sexual acts). For this blog: a cropped photo that lets us focus on the model’s tattoo; and a drawing by Fillion of himself with his cast of characters from the 2005 book Heroes:

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Phallicity, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Between the desert and the couch

May 1, 2016

The May Day Bizarro, in Cartoon Cliché Land:

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)

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Posted in Cartoon conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

oo-(w)ee!

April 29, 2016

/ˌuˈ(w)i/, used as an exclamation. OED3 (Sept. 2013):

N.Amer. colloq. Expressing astonishment, admiration, dismay, etc. [first cite 1910]

(No one seems to have looked at actual usage in any detail — a tough task for colloquial expressions in general, but especially tough for exclamations.)

Why do I mention it? Because of my posting “sg /u/, pl /i/” a couple days ago — with sg / pl pairs involving these vowels, but also nonoccurring pairs like noose / neese. And then, in the April 2016 Funny Times, this Mark Stivers cartoon starting with the sg / pl pairs tooth / teeth and foot / feet, and then immediately branching off into silly play with pairs like toon / teen:

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Posted in Expressive language, Linguistics in the comics, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Two gay graphic novels

April 24, 2016

Not that these are the only two, but I have them both in my library and they make a startling contrast:

Howard Cruse’s 1995 novel Stuck Rubber Baby

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And Peter Milligan & Duncan Fregredo’s 1995 compilation volume Enigma of their superhero comic book series

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(text by Milligan, drawings by Fegredo, coloring by van Valkenburgh)

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Meteor Storm

April 24, 2016

About the 2010 film and the two lead actors, who were immediately familiar to me, though I couldn’t say from where. Ultimately, this posting is about “ordinary working actors” (the phrase is based on Chuck Fillmore’s notion of Ordinary Working Grammarians) — people who get into acting (often via odd routes), practice the craft in children’s theater, college theater, soap operas, commercials, modeling, regional theater and other stage productions, whatever, and then become part of a cadre of accomplished professionals, very few of whom become stars or celebrities, but still give pleasure to audiences and are often liminally recognizable.

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