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Gentle mockery
Today’s Calvin and Hobbes: Calvin in one of his roles, as a 6-year-old boy in love with the clash of titans and destruction on a massive scale (he also has his moments of knowledge and opinion beyond...
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Sexting with emoji
(Talk of sexual bodyparts and sexual acts, but with symbols rather than pictures of carnal reality.) From the NYT‘s Fashion & Style section on the 14th, “Gaymoji: A New Language for That Search” by...
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More Magrittean disavowals
Today’s Zippy: (#1) One in a long series of Zippy strips about Tod Browning’s film Freaks, the characters in it, and the actors who played them (only some of them posted about here). Also one in a long...
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Bluto says: join or else
Aggressive days in the men’s underwear world, in my adaptation of a Daily Jocks ad from the 11th. There will be hot men in their underwear, suggestive captions, and a certain amount of syntax,...
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Can you say “cat”? Can you spell “cat”?
Two recent One Big Happy strips: (#1) Can you say … “cat”… um, “sheepshank”? The Mister Rogers trope Can you say X? ‘Say X’ (in a pedagogical tone); idiomatic go/get (all) X on Y (#2) Can you spell...
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scratch and sniff card
The One Big Happy from February 10th: The sign says (but with reduced and): SCRATCH AND SNIFF CARDS Is that to be parsed as conjoined imperatives — you are to scratch and to sniff cards — or as an NP...
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Two occasions, four cartoons
(There will be talk of men’s bodies, among a number of other things, so you might want to exercise some caution.) Yesterday was National Underwear Day (utilitarian garments elevated to objects of play,...
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Book flash: New Work on Speech Acts
What looks to be an excellent report on work in semantics/pragmatics on speech acts, from OUP: (#1) Alerted to this by Geoff Nunberg on ADS-L, who provided the following note on his piece: Includes my...
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Asking questions and giving commands
The text for the day is a dialogue posted on Facebook on the 19th by John Beavers (a guitarist who moonlights as a linguistics professor at the University of Texas, Austin), between John’s son Ezra and...
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What room am I in?
This photoon passed on to me by Karen Chung on Facebook (I have no idea of its ultimate source): (#1) Context, context, context. The spatial P in can locate a person p in context in (at least) two...
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Annals of indirection
Chip Dunham’s Overboard strip from December 28th: (#1) Captain Crow and his dog Louie An exercise in both syntax/semantics and semantics/pragmatics: on syntactic constructions and their semantics, and...
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Ostentatiously playful allusions
(OPAs, for short.) The contrast is to inconspicuously playful allusions, what I’ve called Easter egg quotations on this blog. With three OPAs from the 4/20/19 Economist, illustrating three levels of...
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Locatives, inalienability, and determiner choices
All this, and more, in two recent One Big Happy cartoons, from 7/2 (I broke a finger — the determiner cartoon) and 7/4 (Where was the Declaration of Independence signed? — the locative cartoon). Both...
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Gloating over them apples
In an advertising poster, for actual apples: (#1) and on a tongue-in-cheek sticker, reproducing a gloat: (#2) Both incorporate phonological reductions of casual speech — ’bout for about, d’ya ([djǝ]...
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Contamination by association
(Regularly skirting or confronting sexual matters, so perhaps not to everyone’s taste.) Yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro takes us back to the Garden of Eden: (#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols...
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The Desert Island Psychiatrist
Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro combo is also a cartoon meme combo: Desert Island + Psychiatrist: (#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 7 in this strip —...
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Before or after?
In the 9/14/19 One Big Happy, Ruthie wrestles with a workbook question, apparently something along the lines of “Does 4th Street come before 6th Street or after it?”: (#1) There’s a lot packed in here....
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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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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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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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