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Aaron Broadwell, the sequel
rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate August, with a leporine shout-out to remember 1291, the traditional date of the formation of the Swiss federation: Hail, Helvetia! Now to dive into today’s topic in...
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From the annals of NAA
The most recent Stephan Pastis Pearls Before Swine strip: A classic NAA (non-apology apology): if you take offence, it’s your problem (in the strip: I’m sorry you were offended; ramped up: I’m sorry...
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Can I help?
rabbit rabbit rabbit for the new month, which is coming in locally with October showers (a tiny amount of rain, but always an excitement in what is still the dry season in this part of the world)...
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Gay banter: great big green beans
tiger tiger tiger for ultimate August, also (US) Labor Sunday (everything — September, Labor Day, even World War II, 86 years ago in Poland — breaks tomorrow); meanwhile, it’s all gay banter about...
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Reading signs
Rina Piccolo’s Rhymes With Orange strip of 7/21 presents us with a dog that can read — not just converting text to sound (speaking written or printed matter aloud), but, crucially for the strip,...
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May I take your coat?
A Sandra Boynton turkey cartoon from 1980, showing a (polite) offer framed as a request in the form of a question, using the formula May I VP?: (#1) The exchange — with the offer made by a turkey who...
View ArticleSucking the life out of the state
Returning to a very old topic on this blog, making small advances on some outstanding puzzles. It starts with my 6/8/11 posting (yes, 14 years ago) “Parasites and the body politic”, about my dismayed...
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You’ve gotta eat your Froot Loops, kid
The cartoon. Today’s Zippy strip is a translation of an everyday family drama into a surreal Dingburg version, in the household of Zippy and Zerbina and their children, the boy Fuelrod and the girl...
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Love what Scrivan did with the rabbit pun!
three rabbits to inaugurate the new month, three jokers for April Fool’s Day, and three jaunes d’Avril. yellow flowers of April, all this as we turn on a dime from yesterday’s folk-custom bunnies of...
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Dynamic semantics wins a prize
Firecrackers! For a prize from the Swedish royal academies, something you might think of as a Nobel Prize’s little brother, awarded to two colleagues in linguistics and philosophy, one an old friend...
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The decade of no skateboarding
An old One Big Happy strip that’s been hanging around on my desktop for a couple of years. When you go to explain why it’s so weirdly funny, it turns out to be a complex exercise in what’s known in the...
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Indirect speech acts on the phone
To cope with a day when I’m overwhelmed with e-mail to answer, an old Calvin and Hobbes strip salted away for just such days: They exchange greeting hellos, and then the caller, detecting that the...
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Is the farmer busy or pretty?
An old One Big Happy strip, one in a long series in which Ruthie or her brother Joe is confronted with some type of test question (rather than an information-seeking question): Ruthie is laboring at a...
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Why do you ask?
The One Big Happy strip that came up in my comics feed on 12/7/18 — the Ramona St. posting mill grinds slowly, very slowly — is all about pragmatics, in particular what we take to be the point of...
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Don’t ask! 2
A Peanuts strip, featuring Charlie Brown and Peppermint Patty: (#1) But wait! Patty’s Don’t ask! is not a request for Charlie not to ask about her feelings (which would directly contradict her...
View ArticleWho am I kidding?
(Note: in this posting I’m going to be unrelentingly careful about the way I frame descriptions of linguistic phenomena (not falling back on the descriptive language of school grammar, which would be...
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They do not act that way
From my comics backlog, a One Big Happy strip that turns on the distinction (in the philosophy of language) between descriptive statements (about what is) and normative statements (about what should...
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What question are you asking?
The 11/27 One Big Happy strip, which came up in my comics feed recently: The father’s question, asking for a choice, appears to be an opinion-seeking question, of a sort that adults often exchange...
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No offense (intended)
From the American tv series Emergency! S7 E11 “The Convention” (from 7/3/79), a tv movie following the regular series. Two women end up serving as a paramedic team together — female paramedics were a...
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The library hookers and booze joke
The joke, which was new to me and entertained me enormously: (#1) Then, passed on my a friend yesterday, from Facebook, the joke supplied with a photo, the result then labeled as a “meme” (in my terms,...
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