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Rhetorical questions as openers
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 /...
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Calvin x 3
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:...
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Three musicians walk into La Côte Basque…
(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,...
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Sarcastic and literal
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...
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How ’bout them Cubbies?
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...
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Pub(l)ic notice
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....
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Word avalanche
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...
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don’t know
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...
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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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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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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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My Hobby Comics
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...
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Speech act ambiguity
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....
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“illegal”
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...
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The philosopher at the cinema and in the marketplace
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...
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Hypothetical indirection
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...
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Saying but disavowing
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...
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Answering a question with a question
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...
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Three from the New Yorker
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...
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Look who’s talking!
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...
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