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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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Joke time
A request went out on Facebook recently for favorite jokes. Lots of responses, most of them old acquaintances. But this one, from Michael Babinec, was new to me: Queen Elizabeth is touring a new...
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doge
First it was cats (especially lolcats), now it’s dogs, well doges. From a February 6th posting on The Toast site by Gretchen McCullochon. ‘A Linguist Explains the Grammar of Doge. Wow.” (Passed on by...
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Putin on the Ritz
From this site (Sad and Useless), this still from an animation: Ordinarily, I’d unpack this image, but in the Linguage of Comics course at Stanford this quarter, Elizabeth Traugott and I have been...
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Pun to start the week
From the Funny Times Cartoon Playground (with reader-generated cartoons), this one by contributor cta: In keeping with some other recent cartoon postings, consider this as an exercise: what...
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flamenco
Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm: You say flamenco, I say flamingo. Amazingly, these words turn out to share a history. NOAD2 on flamenco: ORIGIN late 19th cent.: Spanish, ‘like a Gypsy,’ literally...
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Allusive pun
Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm: For a change, I won’t leave this as an exercise for the reader. Two crucial pieces: a pun on fence — a barrier or someone who sells stolen goods — and an allusion to...
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Yet another pun
Today seems to be pun day. Passed on by Barbara Need on Facebook, this Bizarro from 2009: Groan: phero- vs. pharaoh. These are homonyms for some speakers, near-homonyms for others (who have have [æ]...
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Another word avalanche
Today’s Pearls Before Swine, with yet another word avalanche: A chain of rhymes or near-rhymes. With Rat, as so often, upbraiding the cartoonist. I’m irrationally fond of these.
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Another allusive pun
Yesterday’s Mother Goose and Grimm with an outrageous pun: From Wikipedia: The proverb the enemy of my enemy is my friend suggests that two parties can or should work together against a common enemy....
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Two Pearls
Two recent Pearls Before Swine strips: (#1) (#2) Doctor. Doctor Seuss was, of course, not a doctor of anything. Briefest story, from Wikipedia: Theodor Seuss Geisel (… March 2, 1904 – September 24,...
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Yet another pun
From Mother Goose and Grimm: The relevant senses of the verb spoil, from NOAD2: [ no obj. ] (of food) become unfit for eating: I’ve got some ham that’ll spoil if we don’t eat it tonight. harm the...
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Party on, Darth
[edited later on 2/25, to move the Batman theme from a comment (by Dave Kathman) to the body of the posting] From Victor Steinbok, who found it on George Takei’s site, this cartoon: A festival of...
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Two Wednesday cartoons
A Zippy on lexical semantics, and a wry Zits on watching your language: (#1) Define sup, and distinguish the referent from slurp. The proper names are, as usual for Zippy, entertaining, and the title...
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Two compounds
Two N-N compounds that came by me recently, one silly, one serious. Both are subsective: the referent of the compound as a whole is a subtype of the referent of the second (head) noun. But in neither...
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Swamp Thing
Today’s Rhymes With Orange, with a pun and an inter-comic reference: (#1) The pun is easy: lawn face / long face (based on the idiom have a long face ‘look sad’). Then there’s the cultural allusion...
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Minimumble
From Benjamin Slade, pointers to Chris Hallbeck’s webcomic site Minimumble, with three recent language-related cartoons: From 2/12/14, treating procrastinator as pro + castinator, with pro treated as a...
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The Monday morning pun
Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm: On carpe diem, see my posting “Seize the day”, here.
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Eleganza
Today’s goofy Zippy: A grab-bag of stuff here, beyond the 60s clothes: the playful coolth (which has been around for some time) and Clauditude (certainly special to Zippy); the punning allusion to...
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