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Monday language comics
Two Monday comics on linguistic topics: a Calvin and Hobbes with an unfortunate ambiguity (pitch the tent), and a Zits with a portmanteau for a combo sport (dodgebowl): (#1) (#2) Pitch the tent. The...
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The 31-room elephant in the room
Today’s Zippy, with 19th-century novelty architecture: (#1) From Wikipedia: The Elephantine Colossus, otherwise known as the Colossal Elephant or the Elephant Colossus, or by its function as the...
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Fixed expressions
Two recent cartoons turning on fixed expressions, compounds in fact: a Rhymes With Orange and a One Big Happy: (#1) (#2) working girl. #1 turns on the ambiguity of the compound working girl, in both...
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Two OBHs
Two recent One Big Happy strips, one with Joe updating a nursery rhyme (with Ruthie’s help), one with Ruthie once again in the Land of Ambiguity: (#1) (#2) Three Blind Mice. Joe’s ingenious elaboration...
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A Minneapolis fling
Today’s Zippy takes us to Minneapolis MN, where people are flinging bowling balls, flinging them down Memory Lanes: (#1) Linguistic notes: Ok, the pun on lane (in a bowling alley vs. in the...
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How’s that coming?
A P.C. Vey cartoon in the latest (Sept. 5th) New Yorker: Three things: the parallel between a steak on the grill and a book in progress; authorial anxiety over writing on something and completing it;...
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Taking the job description literally
Two recent Dilberts: (#1) (#2) First Dilbert and the quality assurance guy Alan, then the pointy-haired boss and Alan. Standard dictionaries don’t seem to have the technical use of assurance in...
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the Vegas idea
A recent One Big Happy has Ruthie, once again, coping with an expression unfamiliar to her — the negative polarity item (NPI) have the vaguest idea, under the scope of negative n’t in doesn’t have the...
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Naked boys playing at liberty
About male photography featuring naked men horsing around together, mostly at the beach. The (four) X-rated images are in a posting on AZBlogX; they’re there because they show penises, but in (I...
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tail in the air
(Some vernacular sex talk along the way, so some judgment might be called for.) It started with Dave Hause on ADS-L reporting this item from the seekingalpha site (with the crucial bit boldfaced...
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Idiom blends, with wine and roses
Yesterday’s Doonesbury, with Lacey and Jeremy in the senior dating scene: Wonderful idiom blends (also mixed metaphors): march to a different kettle of fish (march to a different drummer + a different...
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Two poignant cartoons
A mildly poignant Zippy, in which things have come to the point where Griffy almost misses Richard Nixon. And another deeply poignant episode in the Doonesbury account of Lacey and Jeremy’s adventures...
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You can’t judge a story by its title
The One Big Happy in today’s comics feed: The assigned story was “The Princess and the Pea”, but Joe had heard only the title (and a bit of the plot), so /pi/ could have been the letter P, or...
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The eyes reject
From a Facebook discussion between a black woman T, a white guy C, and me, over the interpretation of a baffling — because drastically poor in detail — news story involving two young black men, a set...
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Batty stuff
Over on ADS-L, there’s been riffing on batshit and other bat-crazy stuff. Which led things to the comic strip Shoe and its character Batson D. Belfry: (#1) Senator Batson D. Belfry, beltway blowhard,...
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Gay men on the new subway walls
Widely reported, in the middle of stories about the extension of the 2nd Avenue subway in NYC, a piece about Vik Muniz’s mural in the 96th St. station, with over three dozen mosaics of typical New...
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Meaty matters
(Mostly about language, but male bodies and bodyparts play significant roles.) Yesterday, a posting about a fantasy agency supplying male hustlers, featuring two meat + N compounds: meat market ‘sexual...
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Understanding the comics
Once again, I return to the question of what you have to know to understand a comic strip or a cartoon, with two recent cartoons in my comics feed, a Rhymes With Orange and a Bizarro; in both,...
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Playing for laughs
… or, playing over the top, and in fact doing this knowingly while winking at the audience, so that you might want to say: camping it up. I refer to the Netflix version of A Series of Unfortunate...
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No whey in hell
On Pinterest this morning, along with a bunch of Gary Larson cartoons, this cartoon by Dan Thompson from some time ago: (#1) Ingredients: “Little Miss Muffet”; homophony (or near-homophony) of whey and...
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