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They do not act that way
From my comics backlog, a One Big Happy strip that turns on the distinction (in the philosophy of language) between descriptive statements (about what is) and normative statements (about what should...
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(Note: in this posting I’m going to be unrelentingly careful about the way I frame descriptions of linguistic phenomena (not falling back on the descriptive language of school grammar, which would be...
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Don’t ask! 2
A Peanuts strip, featuring Charlie Brown and Peppermint Patty: (#1) But wait! Patty’s Don’t ask! is not a request for Charlie not to ask about her feelings (which would directly contradict her...
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Why do you ask?
The One Big Happy strip that came up in my comics feed on 12/7/18 — the Ramona St. posting mill grinds slowly, very slowly — is all about pragmatics, in particular what we take to be the point of...
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Is the farmer busy or pretty?
An old One Big Happy strip, one in a long series in which Ruthie or her brother Joe is confronted with some type of test question (rather than an information-seeking question): Ruthie is laboring at a...
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Indirect speech acts on the phone
To cope with a day when I’m overwhelmed with e-mail to answer, an old Calvin and Hobbes strip salted away for just such days: They exchange greeting hellos, and then the caller, detecting that the...
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The decade of no skateboarding
An old One Big Happy strip that’s been hanging around on my desktop for a couple of years. When you go to explain why it’s so weirdly funny, it turns out to be a complex exercise in what’s known in the...
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Dynamic semantics wins a prize
Firecrackers! For a prize from the Swedish royal academies, something you might think of as a Nobel Prize’s little brother, awarded to two colleagues in linguistics and philosophy, one an old friend...
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Love what Scrivan did with the rabbit pun!
three rabbits to inaugurate the new month, three jokers for April Fool’s Day, and three jaunes d’Avril. yellow flowers of April, all this as we turn on a dime from yesterday’s folk-custom bunnies of...
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You’ve gotta eat your Froot Loops, kid
The cartoon. Today’s Zippy strip is a translation of an everyday family drama into a surreal Dingburg version, in the household of Zippy and Zerbina and their children, the boy Fuelrod and the girl...
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