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 as “sassy/sarcastic” (conveying ‘Get out of here!’ or something of the sort) by one that has only the literal meaning he intends. Similarly for “What do you want me to do about it?” (conveying unwillingness to do anything about it) and “Welcome to the real world!” (conveying that things are generally tough in life, so you should stop complaining). Not a fully successful strategy.

On Facebook, Jeff Runner took great pleasure in the strip, noting that he especially liked “the part about words being filed under “sassy molassy” in the lexicon!”

 

Reduplicative compounds

Today’s Rhymes With Orange:

Hippy-dippy, artsy-fartsy. Compound-like combinations with parts that aren’t semantically independent but are related phonologically, in this case by rhyme. In addition to rhyming reduplication (as in these cases), there’s also exact reduplication (yada yada, wee wee, chi chi; see this posting for the clever  punning invention tako-taco) and ablaut reduplication (chitchat, dilly-dally, tittle-tattle), with the accented vowel varied but the remainder of the components remaining the same. Many reduplicative compounds are negative in tone, as hippy-dippy and artsy-fartsy are in ordinary usage. For hippy dippy in the cartoon, more is going on, since there’s a pun on dip involved.

Body language and Lithuanians

Today’s Zippy returns to the topic of facial expression and gesture in Dingburg:

Five stances (or gestures), each with an absurdly specific meaning (some of which suggest, in snowclonish way, proverbs or quotations). Plus an appearance of Lithuanians.

Ralf König

I was pointed to a classic gay comic by the bibliography in the entertaining and informative The Dick Book: Tuning Your Favorite Body Part (Micha Schulze & Christian Scheuss, Bruno Gmünder 2013, translation of Das Schwanzbuch. Tuning für dein bestes Stück 2008): Ralf König’s The Killer Condom (2009 Ignite! Entertainment (rev. ed.); 1992 The Killer Condom Catalan Communications, translation from German by Jim Steakley of 1988 Kondom des Grauens [‘Condom of Horror’] Edition Kunst der Comics/Ralf König). Aside from the pleasures of the story, there’s some snowclonish interest.

Taco sauce

Today’s Zippy:

The strip is a lead-in to a pun so dreadful — the Holy Grill for the Holy Grail — that it’s wonderful. Then there’s the taco sauce theme and the snowlone let the X commence in the title.

The first swallow

From Bert Vaux on Facebook, from the Belgian paper De Standaard:

Roughly, the first swallow is not what it used to be.

A play on the formula the first swallow of summer – the harbinger of the summer season. (Last year’s first sighting reported on the (UK) National Trust site here.)

 

boys

Back on December 31st, I posted on male photographer David Arnot and his Boy Next Door calendars (for 2012 and 2013), with a full set of the images from the 2012 calendar. On Facebook, Michael Newman then inquired:

On a language point, doesn’t “boys next door,” imply a kind of (pseudo)unposed twinkish look? If so, these guys may be hot, but not in a boy-next-door way.

Michael is both a card-carrying linguist and a gay man, so brings two kinds of inside information to the discussion, both relevant, and, in this case, his critique is right on. These  guys might or might not be hot — that’s a matter of taste — but they’re not boys next door, in modern American English, at any rate

Colors

A display of new crayon colors, from the Miss. Fits Facebook site, passed along by Ruth Lawrence:

Think of it as a complex exercise in sociocultural knowledge. My favorites are yellow and purple, for their grotesque specificity, but the more cerebral among you might favor gray or black.

Then there’s the Eagle Shirtmakers contest of 1961 for naming shirt colors.

Language play log

Three items with language play in them that came by me recently, in the order of their appearance: (1) the Mental Floss list of their ten best-selling t-shirts; (2) an Ian Shoales piece rushing through “The Catchphrase History of the World”; and (3) some porn flick titles.

The fruits of abstraction

A Wondermark cartoon that’s been getting some attention recently:

This totally cracks me up, especially the last panel. Well, of course, The Bananas of Lust would be really hot stuff.