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Spiders and flies
Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm: A transposition of the parts of a familiar saying. Time flies when you’re having fun came up recently in a somewhat different kind of language play, a simple pun in a...
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On the lam at Lim’s
Today’s Zippy: (#1) Word play in lam / Lim’s. Then there’s the slang idiom on the lam and the diner in the strip. On the lam ‘in flight, on the run (esp. from the law)’ is attested from 1897; from a...
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More Family Circus parodies
On tumblr, the comic Time is a Flat Circus, with recaptioned Family Circus comics — most not deeply linguistic, but rather dark and pointed. Two examples, from 12 and 14 April, respectively: (#1) (#2)...
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Silly pun
In the most recent New Yorker (of April 21st), this droll cartoon by P. S.Mueller: fairy / ferret. On the cartoonist, from Wikipedia: Pete S. Mueller is an American cartoonist and voice actor. His...
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Three for today
Three cartoons for today: a Dilbert, a Bizarro, and a Mother Goose and Grimm: (#1) (#2) (#3) #1 shows the pointy-headed boss failing to respect the Gricean maxim of Quantity, by saying considerably...
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Three for the day (Easter)
Today’s crop of cartoons includes a Bizarro, a Zippy, and a Mother Goose and Grimm: (#1) (#2) (#3) In #1, the kid is obviously a cartoon character, while his parents are represented as what count as...
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Eating and nothingness
Today’s Zippy, on the emptiness of the Automats, with a nice pun in the title: (#1) The Automats. From Wikipedia: Horn & Hardart was a food services company in the United States noted for...
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A Dilbert and a Rhymes
Cartoons today: (#1) (#2) On #1: Dilbert reports advice about using language to make him more likeable. The first half of this advice — using people’s names — is advice for salespeople (it’s...
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Krazy Kat
Fred Shapiro on ADS-L yesterday: Since I am now working on the second edition of the Yale Book of Quotations, let me ask, were there any particularly memorable catchphrases or one-off quotations from...
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Mole Vole
Posted on Facebook by Jeff Shaumeyer: Jeff writes: Here’s an interior shot at Bowen’s Farm Supply. I took it mostly because I was moved by the poetry of the phrase “Mole Vole Rodent Control”. The...
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The poetry of green tea
Among the many teas sold by Tazo (from South Seattle WA) are three green teas that my daughter got for me recently, to replenish my supplies. The company is into lush, poetic descriptions of its...
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Pirate chickens
A Savage Chickens from 2008, reproduced in the Stanford Linguistic newsletter the Sesquipedalian today: yo-heave-ho, bow-wow, pooh-pooh? Talk Like a Pirate Day isn’t until September 19th, but pirate...
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Dingburg bubbles
Today’s Zippy: (#1) Fleer’s product was pink (hence the strip’s title, “In the pink”), apparently because that was the only coloring the inventor had on hand. From Wikipedia: Dubble Bubble is a...
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The St. Francis
Not the hotel or the yacht club or the hospital in San Francisco (or the high school in Mountain View or the winery in Sonoma), but the St. Francis Fountain, as celebrated in today’s Zippy: (#1) From...
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Go with the flow
Yesterday’s Partially Clips (hat tip to David Craig): I can’t say that I appreciate the details of Zener diodes, but conventional diodes allow the (electrical) current to flow in only one direction,...
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Schadenfreudian slip
Today’s Zippy: Griffy and Zippy contemplate the end of the world, and Griffy wonders if Schadenfreude would be appropriate in the situation. Zippy then takes it one step further with the POp (phrasal...
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Three more for Friday
Three cartoons today, on diverse topics: Calvin and Hobbes on explanations, Zits on means of communication (again), Bizarro on word play turning on ambiguity. (#1) Inventive but screwy explanation,...
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Tom of Smurfland
[Warning: Doesn't actually show genital nudity, but it comes damn close.] From several sources on the net, a mashup of the gay porn cartoon figures drawn by Tom of Finland and the Smurfs from the...
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Holidays and events
Early May has nine occasions of significance in my household; seven of them have a wider significance. In any case, it’s a busy time. I posted about most of these in 2012, here. Now to expand on those...
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