Today’s Zippy:

You know what X? is a scheme for opening a conversation, or a new segment of a conversation:

You know what I hate / think? You know what I’m thinking / gonna do? You know what scares / annoys me? You know what pisses me off?

Framed as a question, but not seeking information; after all, how could the addressee know what’s in the speaker’s mind?. The speaker is going to answer the question, in any case, and the most that’s expected of the addressee is an encouragement for the speaker to go on: No, what? or something of the sort.

And then there’s the bonding of men through mutual insult and contention, giving in this case “new best friends”, as the strip’s title says.

As for Lippy, the Zippy site tells us that he’s

Zippy’s twin, yet diametrically opposite, brother. Lippy dresses in black and thrives on misery– his own as well as others. He only enters Zippy’s life for one purpose: to try and make him unhappy. Good luck, Lippy.

Here he’s out on his own, where he comes across the sociopathic Mr. the Toad.

From the Best of Calvin and Hobbes site, three strips: on inattention and question-answering; on phone answering as a linguistic routine; and on indirect speech acts.

The dangers of inattention:

Entertaining that Calvin, trying to cover his bases as he returns from being Spaceman Spiff, reels off five answers to questions that Mrs. Wormwood might have asked.

Next, Calvin imitates an answering machine:

He’s got the verbal part of the routine down pat, but doesn’t quite get the point of the exercise (or chooses to ignore it).

Finally, Calvin’s mother uses an indirect speech act, asking “What are you doing?” but conveying ‘What have you done?!’, i.e., ‘You shouldn’t have done that!’

To Calvin, the answer to the question, understood literally, should have been obvious.

(Note that Calvin’s question is also rhetorical: a yes-no question conveying ‘This is some sort of trick question, right?’)

(Only a little bit of language in this one.)

Long obituaries for Elliott Carter this week, celebrating a very long career — he was still composing almost up to his death at 103 — characterized by, among other things, great independence of mind. The New York Times gave Allan Kozinn a huge amount of space to reflect on Carter’s life and works (“Elliott Carter, Composer Who Decisively Snapped Tradition, Dies at 103″), including some anecdotes (it’s easy to catalogue the Pulitzer Prizes and other awards, not so easy to give a feel for what someone was like and what moved them).

Which brings me to a story that was in the print version of the obit but was snipped out of the on-line version. Carter and Igor Stravinsky are joined by a third man…

From the print edition:

Speaking to a Bloomberg.com reporter in 2012, Mr. Carter told a story in which he was having dinner, and speaking French, with Stravinsky and Stravinsky’s wife at La Côte Basque when a man approached and said – “in rather good French” – “Will the maestro please give me an autograph?”

Note 1: The reader is expected to understand the significance of La Côte Basque. From Wikipedia:

La Côte Basque was a New York restaurant. It opened in the late 1950s and operated until it closed on March 7, 2004. In business for 45 years, upon its closing The New York Times called it a “former high-society temple of French cuisine at 60 West 55th Street.”

… Famous patrons included Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Babe Paley and Frank Sinatra.

The Bloomberg.com original provided a bit more context:

[Interviewer:] What was your favorite restaurant?

Carter: La Cote Basque, now sadly closed. I took Igor Stravinsky and his wife there. We got a table in the middle of the room, speaking French, and a man came in, and said in rather good French, “will the maestro please give me an autograph?”

Note 2: Either Carter didn’t recognize the man, or he was concealing his knowledge from the interviewer (perhaps to improve the story). Of course, this wasn’t just some random guy off the street, but another patron of the elegant restaurant, so Stravinsky might have been expected to treat him politely.

Note 3: The man was speaking “rather good French”, and this was in some way notable in the context. Speaking French at La Côte Basque would hardly have been remarkable, but something in the man’s manner or appearance suggested otherwise to Carter.

Stravinsky was bluntly dismissive: “Certainly not.”

The Bloomberg.com version quotes Carter on what ensued:

His wife did a great deal of talking in Russian and finally he agreed, but took forever to write out his name. The man waited and waited and by this point the whole room was watching.

In the NYT, Kozinn boiled this down to:

After first refusing, and as the whole room watched, Stravinsky relented.

After that the two accounts don’t differ in any significant way. From Bloomberg.com:

Finally Stravinsky was done and the man thanked him and walked away. We asked Stravinsky if he knew who he was and he said, “Certainly, I see him on television all the time.” The man was Frank Sinatra.

(Recall that Sinatra was a regular patron of the restaurant.)

My first reading was that Carter didn’t recognize Sinatra, and that surprised me, given Sinatra’s fame and Carter’s background as a protégé of the American modernist Charles Ives and as someone with distinctly populist leanings (and an occasional patron of the restaurant himself). I would have thought that Carter would have been an admirer of Sinatra’s performances.

But then I saw the possibility that in asking Stravinsky if he knew who the man was, Carter wasn’t asking for information on his own behalf, to remedy his own ignorance of the facts, but was asking about the state of Stravinsky’s knowledge, to find out if Stravinsky’s knowledge matched his own. Do you know questions can go either way: they merely ask about what the addressee knows, but that inquiry can have different reasons or purposes, depending on the speaker’s state of knowledge.

So now I think Carter’s question to Stravinsky could have been reported with an interrobang: Do you know who that man is?!

Yesterday’s Dinosaur Comics:

T. Rex maintains he just wants to warn people about doors hitting them — this strikes me as dubious indeed — so he has to rephrase an expression that has been lexicalized as “sassy/sarcastic” (conveying ‘Get out of here!’ or something of the sort) by one that has only the literal meaning he intends. Similarly for “What do you want me to do about it?” (conveying unwillingness to do anything about it) and “Welcome to the real world!” (conveying that things are generally tough in life, so you should stop complaining). Not a fully successful strategy.

On Facebook, Jeff Runner took great pleasure in the strip, noting that he especially liked “the part about words being filed under “sassy molassy” in the lexicon!”

Today’s Zippy:

So the strip is “about” hair(s), but it’s also “about” How ’bout them Cubbies?

(On a personal hair and holiday note: I’m watching Hairspray for Mothers Day.)

1. Speech acts. Let’s start with How about those Cubs? — illustrating an idiomatic construction in which a sentence in the form of an information question (in how about) functions as mild exclamation about the focus of the sentence (the Chicago Cubs baseball team) and an invitation to the addressee to talk about that focus. This a conventionalization of a specific question form for a specific speech act — something that you have to learn if you are to be competent as a speaker of vernacular American English.

2. Background knowledge. If you don’t know about the Cubbies, then the question will misfire. Apparently Zippy (“Are they imaginary?”) and San Bruno (“I don’t care for synchronized diving”) don’t get it.

3. Social context. Things are more complicated than that, since the question is usually addressed by men to men, typically in an attempt to initiate a conversation between guys who are not socially close. Neither of these clauses is a rigid condition on use, but follow from the social fact that sports talk is stereotypically a “masculine” province and so can serve as neutral social grease for men without much shared experience.

4. Cubbies. Then there’s the affectionate diminutive for Cubs – conveying an emotional attachment to the team.

5. ’bout. And the casual-speech reduction of about to ’bout — further marking the sentence as informal, vernacular.

6. Demonstrative them. But the big point — note Glutina’s “I don’t think that’s grammatical” — is demonstrative them in them Cubbies (instead of those Cubbies). This is a very widespread non-standardism.

MWDEU has a nice entry on demonstrative them (pp. 897-8), though it doesn’t solve the puzzle of the form’s source. It’s attested since the end of the 16th century and is pretty clearly not a continuation of the Old English definite article.

It went largely unnoticed for about a century, and then began appearing in literary texts in the 19th century, but almost entirely in representations of speech. By the middle of the 19th century, it was regularly criticized in schoolbooks as a barbarism. Then:

Perhaps because of the efforts of two centuries worth of schoolmasters, the demonstrative them is now largely restricted to the speech of the uneducated and the familiar speech of others. It has been in use for four centuries, and has still not reached respectability.

But where does it come from?

A number of syntacticians have pointed out that for 1st and 2nd persons, the pl personal pronouns are used as demonstrative determiners: we linguists, (vernacular) us linguists, you linguists, (dialectal) youse linguists. Then, on the model of the vernacular us linguists, we get vernacular  them linguists.

Then, given the vernacular and informal features of how about questions, it’s natural to use them as a demonstrative in them. How (a)bout those Cub(bie)s?  isn’t infelicitous, but it’s on the stiff side; them is more colloquial.

Posted by Jonathan Stover on Facebook:

Well, it might or might not be genuine, but it’s entertaining. And notice that it has a characteristic feature of many notices prohibiting acts: its indirection. It dosn’t say “Don’t masturbate in the showers”; it tells you instead that doing so violates a code. And then it tells you to masturbate in your own room, meaning, instead of in the showers — you’re supposed to work that out from the context — but it doesn’t say that, so it can be understood as an instruction to go and masturbate in your own room. Now.

I haven’t found anything on the UMass Housing Code, outside of this notice. And I’m dubious about the semen buildup in the drains. I do like the instruction to see your RA with any questions you might have. Do RAs give advice about jacking off?

Today’s Pearls Before Swine, with a type of language play I have no ready name for:

(The human in the last panel is the cartoonist, Stephan Pastis. And Rat’s question is rhetorical, conveying ‘the word shame means nothing to you’.)

In this form, you pile up phonologically identical words or parts of words to make a gigantic expression that is almost impossible to parse (without the context that sets up the expression): pen the writing implement, the pen- of penultimate, Sean Penn the actor, and Penn the university; the ultimate ‘final’ of penultimate, ultimate ‘very best’, and the ultimate of Ultimate Frisbee. (On penultimate, ultimate, etc, see this posting.) The effect of the set-up is to license what sounds like a massive attack of stuttering.

Today’s Zits:

The dad’s “I don’t know” conveys that he’s unsure of his opinion on the subject (whatever that is), so he says “Ask Mom”, meaning ‘Ask Mom what she thinks”, with ellipsis of the Wh-clause object of ask, but with understood reference (within that object) to the mother. But Jeremy takes the other possible reading, involving reference to the father — i.e., ‘Ask Mom what I think’ — which, though possible, is unlikely in context (how should the mother know what the father thinks, when he doesn’t know himself?).

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 Slope, Brooklyn, but it seems to have morphed into a completely different Thai restaurant.)

In any case, is asking someone if they want to get high a punishable offense? Does it count as an offer of drugs?

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. Monster portmanteaus. On p. 25 of the New Yorker, Tad Friend in a Talk of the Town piece about horror moviemaker Roger Corman and his wife Julie:

Lately, the Cormans have been producing films for the Syfy channel. The titles are fairly self-explanatory: “Dinocroc,” “Supergator,” “Piranhaconda.” I balked at “Sharktopus,” Corman said. “I told the network, ‘You should go right up to the acceptable level of insanity in a title, but if you go over it, the audience turns against you’ — and then ‘Sharktopus’ was one of their biggest hits.” Coming soon, therefore, is “Sharktopus vs. Pteracuda” — not to be confused with last week’s succès d’estime “Sharknado,” produced by one of Corman’s many imitators.

From “More dubious portmanteaus”:

The world of portmanteaus is crowded with playful formations that are unlikely to survive for long (Higgsteria), including many that are just for ostentatious display (Piranhaconda and Sharktopus).

2. A prize -ize. On p. 45, in John Seabrook’s “The Beach Builders: Can the Jersey Shore be saved?”:

Orrin Pilkey, a distinguished coastal scientist and author from Duke University, calls the state’s approach to coastal engineering “New Jerseyization.” The term is not complimentary.

I have a sizable file on innovations in -ize, often inside nouns in -ization, including some based on proper names: Gitmo-ize, Cape Codization, Atkinize, Nascarization, Wal-Mart-ization, iPodization, Iraqization, Keplerize, Anderson Cooperization, Vermontize, Politico-ization, Walkenize. In older -ize words, there is a resistance to -izing words ending in vowels and words with accented final syllables, but these constraints are generally lifted for proper-name bases: New Jerseyization, Cape Codization.

3. And an excellent -ology. On p. 52, in Julian Rubinstein’s “Operation Easter: The hunt for illegal egg collectors”:

Oology — the study of eggs — is “one of the most exciting areas or ornithology and, in many respects, one of the least known,” Douglas Russell, the curator of the egg collection at [the Natural History Museum at] Tring [north of London], told me.

Oology is in NOAD2, but I don’t recall having seen this wonderful word before.

4. Another portmanteau. From Thib Guicherd-Callin on Facebook yesterday:

Today is my 12th Ameriversary. (Re-read this word carefully.)

America + anniversary.

5. A slur and a mythetymology. From the NYT on July 23rd, “Barbecue Vendors Ejected From Saratoga Over an Ethnic Slur on Their Food Truck” by Thomas Kaplan:

Andrea Loguidice and Brandon Snooks thought they had won the sandwich lottery when they were awarded a spot to sell barbecue at the Saratoga Race Course this summer. To prepare for the crowds, they developed a special menu, bought a six-foot smoker and cleared their calendar.

But on Friday, opening day at Saratoga, their dream went up in smoke. Complaints came in, not about the cooking, but about the name on the side of the food truck: Wandering Dago, which Ms. Loguidice and Mr. Snooks had thought was cheeky and clever, but which racetrack officials deemed simply offensive. The truck was banned from the grounds.

… Ms. Loguidice and Mr. Snooks, who are both Italian-American, started their food truck about a year ago in Schenectady; their best-seller is the HomeWrecker, which features pulled pork, brisket, smoked bacon, barbecue sauce and melted provolone on a toasted ciabatta roll. She said they meant no offense by using the word “dago,” a slur that the Oxford English Dictionary says is derived from the Spanish name Diego, but which they understood to refer to Italian immigrants who were day laborers, and were paid daily, or as the day goes.

“Our daily pay depends on what happens that day, so we just thought it was a fun play on words,” Ms. Loguidice said. She added: “We didn’t think it was derogatory in any manner. It’s self-referential. Who would self-reference themselves in a derogatory manner?”

Anthony J. Tamburri, dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, which is part of the City University of New York, said that regardless of the word’s origin, it was not appropriate for a food truck. He described it as “the most offensive term one could use with regard to an Italian-American.”

An inventive etymology, which removes most of the offense from the word. But it’s a mythetymology, and the word is indubitably offensive. From NOAD2 :

dago  noun ( pl. dagos or dagoes ) informal, offensive   an Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese-speaking person.

Whether dago is the most offensive term for an Italian-American depends on what you think of wop. From NOAD2:

wop  noun informal, offensive   a contemptuous term for an Italian or other southern European.

origin uncertain, perhaps from Italian guappo ‘bold, showy,’ from Spanish guapo ‘dandy.’

There’s a mythetymology for this one too, an acronymic one: from WithOut Papers.

6. Killer whales. From the NYT Science Times on July 30th, in “Smart, Social and Erratic in Captivity” by James Gorman:

[Diana Reiss of Hunter College said] she does not see ambiguity about killer whales. “I never felt that we should have orcas in captivity,” she said. “I think morally, as well as scientifically, it’s wrong.”

The animal in question, Orcinus orca, is actually the largest dolphin. Its name apparently came not because it was a vicious whale, but because it preyed on whales.

That would make killer whale a very odd compound, conveyong ‘whale killer’.  Wikipedia tells a different, though still somewhat confused, story:

The killer whale (Orcinus orca), also referred to as the orca whale or orca, and less commonly as the blackfish, is a toothed [marine mammal] belonging to the oceanic dolphin family. Killer whales are found in all oceans, from the frigid Arctic and Antarctic regions to tropical seas. Killer whales as a species have a diverse diet, although individual populations often specialize in particular types of prey. Some feed exclusively on fish, while others hunt marine mammals such as sea lions, seals, walruses, and even large whales. (link)

Oceanic dolphins are members of the cetacean family Delphinidae. These marine mammals are related to whales and porpoises. They are found worldwide, mostly in the shallower seas of the continental shelves. As the name implies, these dolphins tend to be found in the open seas, unlike the river dolphins, although a few species such as the Irrawaddy dolphin are coastal or riverine. Six of the larger species in the Delphinidae, [including the killer whale (orca),] … are commonly called whales, rather than dolphins (link)

So killer whales are (in common usage) whales, and some of them hunt (and kill) marine mammals, so killer whale isn’t a bad common name.

7. A dubious vow. From Gail Collins’s op-ed column in the NYT, “Things to Skip in August”, on the 15th:

You may remember that, in July, Mayor Bob Filner [of San Diego] was charged with sexual harassment by some of his former supporters who claimed that, among other things, he grabbed female workers around the neck and whispered lewd comments in their ears. That was the moment when the nation first became aware of the term “Filner headlock.”

Initially, the information was all secondhand, and Filner vowed that “the facts will vindicate me.” Even then, things looked ominous. For one thing, the facts-vindication defense had been preceded by a vow to behave differently. It was sort of like announcing that you’re innocent but will definitely never do it again.

Definitely an odd sort of speech act.

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 at all) — called in American street language, “messing with someone’s mind” or “yanking someone’s chain” (closely related: British “having someone on”). It involves saying something that is thought-provoking but not perceptibly appropriate to the situation at hand (so, on the face of it, just false) — often communicated with a formulaic expression (like “no pun intended” or “pardon my French”) attached. It’s a form of aggressive teasing… [ I just hate aggressive teasing]

In the xkcd case, the recipient has been tricked into spending hours fretting to make real sense of the original.

The Stanford course has developed to the point where the students are exploring old topics in new ways and introducing new topics and examples. In general, I don’t feel comfortable writing about these on this blog, at the moment and without the student’s permission. Maybe later. But in this case, I’m relaying some of my advice, not exposing a student’s ideas.

Some bounty from the Stanford Linguistics in the Comics freshman seminar, a collection of xkcd cartoons with subheaded metatext “My Hobby”, searched out by Kyle Qian. Kyle found about 1,300 xkcd cartoons online, 36 of them subheaded this way, and he posted 7 of them with discussion. (I’ll put off posting about his comments until he gives me permission. The cartoons are in some sense public, but Kyle’s analysis is certainly not.)

One of the MHCs (My Hobby Comics) has appeared on this blog before: on “no pun intended” (the metatext). Another, on the reinterpretation of things like sweet-ass car (intentionally) transformed to sweet ass-car is discussed, but not reproduced, here:

(#1)

Then the new ones, reproduced here without comment:

(#2)

(#3)

(#4)

(#5)

(#6)

From an esurance commercial on tv, entitled “Hank” (the key bit is boldfaced):

Hank: My daughter thinks I’m out of touch. So I asked her how I saved 15 percent on car insurance in just 15 minutes.

Neighbor: Huh. (shakes head)

Hank: (looks at phone) “IDK?” What does that mean?

Neighbor: “I don’t know.”

Hank: And I’m the one who’s out of touch. LOL.

The neighbor is answering Hank’s question, a request for information, asking about what “IDK” means. Hank understands this instead as an assertion, by the neighbor, that he doesn’t know what “IDK” means. (Hank then thinks the neighbor is out of touch.)  Both understandings involve assertions, but about different aspects of the conversational exchange.

Readers will recognize this ambiguity as a cousin of a famous speech act ambiguity, in the Abbott and Costello comedy routine “Who’s on first”. A video of the routine, along with a brief analysis, here:

The premise of the sketch is that Abbott is identifying the players on a baseball team for Costello, but their names and nicknames can be interpreted as non-responsive answers to Costello’s questions. For example, the first baseman is named “Who”; thus, the utterance “Who’s on first” is ambiguous between the question (“Which person is the first baseman?”) and the answer (“The name of the first baseman is ‘Who’”).

Not the same thing as the “Hank” ambiguity, but like it involving aspects of the conversational exchange.

Yesterday’s Classic Doonesbury from 1974 (#1, here) looked at the foul mouth of Richard Nixon (and his aides) from Watergate days. Today (again from 1974) we get the President defining the limits of what counts, in U.S. law, as a prosecutable defense (in ordinary language, what counts as illegal):

(Bonus from the Watergate tapes: Nixon’s paranoid anti-Semitism, in his bitter ravings about the Jews.)

Here’s Nixon’s attorney at the time, James D. St. Clair, arguing before the Supreme Court of the United States:

“The President wants me to argue that he is as powerful a monarch as Louis XIV, only four years at a time, and is not subject to the processes of any court in the land except the court of impeachment.”

(Note St. Clair’s care in framing Nixon’s claim about the Imperial Presidency: he doesn’t actually argue the position, but merely says that the President wants him to. A little gem of indirectness.)

For the quote: see The Supremes’ Greatest Hits: ‪The 34 Supreme Court Cases That Most Directly Affect Your Life, by ‪Michael G. Trachtman (‪Sterling Publishing, 2006) p. 131.

The Imperial Presidency returns in 1977, in Nixon’s interview with David Frost on May 19th, brief clip here. The source of the famous:

“When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

Legal opinion in general did not support this interpretation of legal and illegal.

Anthony Lane, reviewing The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in the May 5th New Yorker:

I lost count of the scenes in which Gwen and Peter thrash out the question of whether they should be a couple, and there is a sigh of relief in the cinema when she, deploying what philosophers would call a performative utterance, says simply, “I break up with you,” leaving us to wonder if she pulls the same trick in bed: “And now we approach the orgasm.”

On performative utterances:

In his 1955 William James lecture series, which were later published under the title How to Do Things with Words [(1962)], [J.L.] Austin argued against a positivist philosophical claim that the utterances always “describe” or “constate” something and are thus always true or false. After mentioning several examples of sentences which are not so used, and not truth-evaluable (among them non-sensical sentences, interrogatives, directives and “ethical” propositions), he introduces “performative” sentences as another instance.

When uttered by the appropriate person in the appropriate circumstances, a performative utterance doesn’t just describe reality, but actually changes the social reality. “I bet you $5 that it will rain today” makes a bet (entailing certain obigations between the speaker and the addressee).

When the conditions aren’t satisfied, the performative utterance is infelicitous, as in this Esurance tv commercial, in which a woman [Beatrice the Over-Sharer] boasts to some strangers about how much money she’s saved on insurance.

Another woman in the room says “I saved more than that in half the time.” Beatrice isn’t pleased “I unfriend you” as if they were all in a social network [failed attempt at issuing a performative]. The woman replies “That’s not how it works! That’s not how any of this works!”

Today’s (re-run) Calvin and Hobbes:

Hobbes poses a hypothetical question to Calvin: suppose you knew …, then what would you do? Stated as a question, but functioning (indirectly) as a threatening instruction to do a specific thing (not named in the question, but inferrable from the context): do this, and today will not be the last day of your life — that is, DO THIS!

From the NYT on Monday (9/30), “Some Judicial Opinions Require Only 140 Characters: Justice Don Willett of the Texas Supreme Court Lights Up Twitter” by Jesse Wegman:

One of Justice Willett’s tweets in 2013 showed a Bundt cake covered in chocolate sauce. The caption — “I like big bundts & I cannot lie” — was a pun on a line in “Baby Got Back,” a hugely popular and sexually explicit 1990s rap song. (When asked about that tweet, he said in an email, “Believe me, I’d never tweet the actual lyrics, or anything close to them.”) He said he has heard no complaints about that tweet, or any other.

Of course, the justice would never utter those words (and openly accept the sexist import of the rap song), but he’ll do his best to allude to them so clearly that anyone in the know will get the message. He’s saying, as clearly as he can, but disavowing the substance of what he’s saying. I’m not sure what the right term is for this speech act, but it certainly deserves one.

For those who are not in the know, here’s Wikipedia on “Baby Got Back”:

“Baby Got Back” is a song written and recorded by American artist Sir Mix-a-Lot, from his album Mack Daddy.

… At the time of its original release, the song caused controversy with its outspoken and blatantly sexual lyrics about women, as well as specific references to the female buttocks which some people found objectionable. … “Baby Got Back” has remained popular and even anthemic since it was originally featured on the album Mack Daddy in 1992.

… The first verse begins with “I like big butts and I cannot lie”, and most of the song is about the rapper’s attraction to large buttocks.

(Pun on butts / bundts. But the justice would never quote I like big butts in a tweet — way too unjudicial.)

Today’s Dilbert, with Dilbert and the pointy-headed boss:

Well, responding to a yes-no question with a question could just be a request for information — that would be taking the boss’s question “at face value” — but quite often the second question (conversationally) implicates that the answer to the first question is “yes” (why, the reasoning begins, would the second question have been asked in the first place?)

Two from the 2/29/16 issue, one from the 3/7/16 issue, all having to do with language, but in different ways. Michael Maslin (who’s appeared here twice before) on the 29th, with the opposite of giddyup:

(#1)

(A horse in a tree! How can that be?)

David Thompson (new on this blog) on the 29th:

(#2)

— a cartoon you very much need to be tuned into popular culture to understand.

And Harry Bliss (who already has a Page here) on the 7th:

(#3)

— not a question at all, but a loud complaint (in a sushi restaurant) by a customer who seems to have expected guacamole.

Each of these has a serious bit of absurdity in it, the Maslin most of all.

The Maslin. The brief story on giddy-up, from NOAD2:

giddy-up (also giddap) exclam. used to get a horse to start moving or go faster. ORIGIN 1920s ( as giddap): reproducing a pronunciation of get up.

One surprise here is the recency of the expression. More details in OED2, from 1972:

giddap, int. and v. Also giddy-ap, giddy-up. (Chiefly in imp.) colloq. (orig. U.S.).

int. first cite 1925 (Dreiser, American Tragedy)

v. first cite 1938: D. Runyon Furthermore xiv. 293   Princess O’Hara..tells Gallant Godfrey to giddap, and Gallant Godfrey is giddapping very nicely.

These entries hardly do justice to the extent of spelling variation, which you can sample on the net. First, the spellings are sometimes separated (giddy up), sometimes hyphenated (giddy-up), sometimes solid (giddyup). The first element is variously spelled giddy, giddi, gitty, gitti (note the alternative spellings for the intervocalic voiced tap in American English); the second element is spelled up, ap. (The spelling I recall from my childhood, in which our play involved lots of urging imaginary or toy horses, is gittiap, so it took me a little while to find the dictionary entries.)

Then I go back to the horse in the tree, and I giggle.

A bonus: a Giddy Up t-shirt design, with a unicorn instead of a mere horse, from FluffyCo (www.fluffyco.com):

(#4)

The Thompson. To make any headway at all with this cartoon, you need to recognize an allusion to the line in which Agent 007, James Bond, introduces himself (first in Casino Royale, I believe): the original and the formula (taken over by many others):

Bond…  James Bond. (that is:  LN…  FN + LN.)

(The ellipsis dots represent a pause.)

In the Thompson we’ve got:

bonds… municipal bonds.

The Bliss. Here we go into the world of twisted speech acts. You believe that someone has represented something as an X, but it seems clear to you that it’s not an X. So you take a declarative sentence conveying your understanding of the claim:

You call this an X.

and you query the accuracy of this claim with a question intonation spread over the declarative (similar to situation in reclamatory questions):

You call this an X?

And then, as in so many situations, pointedly questioning the accuracy of a claim implicates that you believe the claim is false. (“You think you’re so smart?”, conveying that you’re not smart at all.) So the diner in #3 conveys his belief that what he has in front of him is not in fact guacamole (as it most surely is not). What’s so goofy about the whole business is that he seems to have expected guacamole in what is transparently a sushi restaurant, when what he’s picking up with his chopsticks (who supplies chopsticks for customers to eat guacamole?) is hosomaki.

To be fair, you could easily make guacamole hosomaki (Id imagine Harry Bliss didn’t know this), and indeed there’s a recipe for spicy cucumber guacamole sushi rolls here. Some rolls:

(#5)

(Note for American sports fans: when the Superbowl is over, this is something you can do with that leftover guacamole dip.)

Interplay between the characters (Richard) Castle and (Kate) Beckett in a re-run from the show (season 1 epsode 8, “Ghosts”, originally broadcast 4/27/09) when they come across a suspect’s room littered with photographs of and clippings about another character:

(1) Look who’s stalking!

Ouch, the pun, on

(2) Look who’s talking!

— an expression that might remind you of the movie. From Wikipedia:

Look Who’s Talking is a 1989 romantic comedy film written and directed by Amy Heckerling, and stars John Travolta and Kirstie Alley. Bruce Willis plays the voice of Mollie’s son, Mikey. The film features George Segal as Albert, the illegitimate father of Mikey.

[Note: the tv show Castle (Wikipedia link) is something of a favorite of mine, and deserves a posting of its own, along with the two stars, Nathan Fillion as Castle (following his success in the fine tv series Firefly) and Stana Katic (in her breakthrough role) as Beckett, who manages to be both really tough and really glamorous.]

Similarly, Look Who’s Talking is used by the Stanford linguistics newsletter The Sesquipedalian as a header for a list of Stanford people giving talks at various places. What we have here is a little construction / idiom I’ll call LookIQ:

LookIQ: imperative look + indirect question, directing the hearer’s attention to something happening in the context, expressing an emphatic imperative, with a tinge of surprise

So: Look what you’re doing! Look where you’re going! Look what’s going on in the corner! Look how I do this! Look who he’s kissing!

Now, look is a perception verb, and perception verbs in general take IQs as complements (She saw how I did the move. He heard what they said. She smelled who was standing next to her.) But look, though it’s a perception verb, doesn’t participate in this construction: *She looked how I did the move. Instead, we have the perception V + P look at: She looked at how I did the move. He looked at what I was doing. She looked at who was talking. But look + IQ and look at + IQ, though close, are subtly different in meaning, in ways that aren’t easy to tease out.

In addition, English has an exclamatory particle look, which is not perceptual: Look, I’m not going to kid you, buddy. More important, it has the very similar-sounding perceptual look in the imperative: Look, boss! Ze plane!

Out of these ingredients we get the idiomatic LookIQ, which combines some of the content of perceptual look at (You should look at who’s talking. Look at who’s talking!) and some of the content of the imperative perceptual look.

But wait! There’s more! LookIQ is idiomatic, but it also serves as the basis for a “speech-act idiom” with an IQ headed by who. At least one idiom dictionary (the Cambridge Idioms Dictionary, 2nd ed. 2006) treats this idiom as specifically involving the IQ who’s talking:

Look who’s talking! (informal): something that you say when someone criticizes another person for doing something that they do themselves ‘She drinks too much, that’s her problem.’ ‘Look who’s talking!’

The general strategy is to impugn a speaker’s standing to speak. This can be done in any number of ways (“Who are you to say that she drinks too much?” etc.), but the Cambridge Idioms Dictionary treats the “Look who’s talking” version as having become conventionalized in this use.

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