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Are we at Pirate’s Cove yet?
Today’s Zippy, a meta-strip on “Are we having fun yet?”: (#1) The use of the catchphrase has apparently shifted over the years, as Griffy explains to Zippy. (Note that Griffy attributes the phrase to...
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man up!
Yesterday’s Pearls Before Swine: Another demonstration of Pig’s ineptitude in using English. Possibly Pig just doesn’t know the idiom. In any case, Man up! is an odd way to communicate ‘There’s a...
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Language trickery
In today’s Pearls Before Swine, Rat tricks Goat into saying something that gets him in trouble: Shades of the mantra “Oo watta na Siam”. (There used to be a Thai restaurant called Watana Siam in Park...
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-less and -ness
Back on July 11th, I posted this: Unlike my other postings this morning, shirtless men will not come into it. That is, this posting is shirtlessnessless. Yes, shirtlessnessless. The formal pattern here...
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Odds and ends 8/18/13
An assortment of short items on various topics, beginning with three from the July 22nd New Yorker. Portmanteaus, New Jerseyization, oology, dago, killer whale, and Gail Collins on Bob Filner. 1....
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Breaking up is hard to do
Yesterday’s Pearls Before Swine: Rat is characteristically insulting; never hire Rat for a delicate task. Then there’s the agentive noun breaker upper (or breaker-upper), with double marking: -er on...
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Pasta apologies
In recent news, Guido Barilla (of the pasta company) offended a great many people by airing his opinions on “homosexual families” (by which he appears to mean same-sex couples, especially male...
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sledge
From David Nash on Google+, this ad (from Australia, I assume): (meaning, ‘in the native language of the country where the games will be held, namely Brazil’ — that is, in Brazilian Portuguese). The...
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Briefy noted: sarcasm in the Court
A letter in the New York Times yesterday, from Ailan Chubb of Rio Rancho NM: That the humor during oral arguments before the Supreme Court is deserving of analysis is interesting (“A Most Inquisitive...
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Opinions
Yesterday’s Dilbert: In everyday reasoning, opinion and belief hold sway; evidence takes precedence only in certain special contexts — legal and scientific, in particular. Which brings us to “I’m...
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Zippirony
Yesterday’s Zippy: First, there’s the morphological form dehumorized, an entirely transparent use of English derivational morphology (‘without humor, with humor removed’), but novel. But then there’s...
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last/past
On the Baltimore Sun blog on the 4th, a piece by John McIntyre on last and past, “Not, unfortunately, the last word”, beginning: No sooner do I put up a post about copy editors’ preoccupation with...
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Poetoon
From Weird Tales Magazine on Facebook, this cartoon, referencing Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”: (Don’t have information on the artist or the original date, alas.) Quoth the raven, “Nevermore”.
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Four cartoons
A sudden avalanche of linuistically interesting cartoons, on a variety of topics. Word confusion. On Facebook, via David Preston, this Rubes cartoon: (#1) rapture / raptor: near-homonyms, so open for...
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London Underground
All over Facebook recently, this site, on “Fake Signs in London Underground”. Here are two of some linguistic interest — on visual communication in social space and on apologies: (#1) (#2) Other signs...
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Zippy nonsense
Today’s Zippy, which incorporates the comic-within-the-comic, Fletcher and Tanya: F&T is a recurrent feature in Zippy. It’s a masterpiece of (Gricean) irrelevance, in which the conversational...
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Messing with my mind
From a Stanford student, this xkcd: What I said to this student: What makes the xkcd so challenging is that it’s an instance of a kind of conversational exchange that has been very little studied (if...
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Metatext in the comics
Another topic arising from the Stanford comics seminar, again from a proposal for a student paper (which I won’t cite here because the topic might change and in any case is still the student’s work,...
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Subtext
A recent Zits: Subtext has come up in the Stanford Language of Comics seminar I’m involved with, in discussions of indirection — primarily, Gricean implicature, in which expressions have a...
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More “How are you?”
Following up on my posting on “How are you?” (and the answer “(I’m) fine”): mail to the NYT. A response much like mine, but more detailed, from linguist Deborah Tannen, and another peeve about...
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