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“illegal”
Yesterday’s Classic Doonesbury from 1974 (#1, here) looked at the foul mouth of Richard Nixon (and his aides) from Watergate days. Today (again from 1974) we get the President defining the limits of...
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The philosopher at the cinema and in the marketplace
Anthony Lane, reviewing The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in the May 5th New Yorker: I lost count of the scenes in which Gwen and Peter thrash out the question of whether they should be a couple, and there is a...
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Hypothetical indirection
Today’s (re-run) Calvin and Hobbes: Hobbes poses a hypothetical question to Calvin: suppose you knew …, then what would you do? Stated as a question, but functioning (indirectly) as a threatening...
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Saying but disavowing
From the NYT on Monday (9/30), “Some Judicial Opinions Require Only 140 Characters: Justice Don Willett of the Texas Supreme Court Lights Up Twitter” by Jesse Wegman: One of Justice Willett’s tweets in...
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Answering a question with a question
Today’s Dilbert, with Dilbert and the pointy-headed boss: Well, responding to a yes-no question with a question could just be a request for information — that would be taking the boss’s question “at...
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Three from the New Yorker
Two from the 2/29/16 issue, one from the 3/7/16 issue, all having to do with language, but in different ways. Michael Maslin (who’s appeared here twice before) on the 29th, with the opposite of...
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Look who’s talking!
Interplay between the characters (Richard) Castle and (Kate) Beckett in a re-run from the show (season 1 epsode 8, “Ghosts”, originally broadcast 4/27/09) when they come across a suspect’s room...
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Gentle mockery
Today’s Calvin and Hobbes: Calvin in one of his roles, as a 6-year-old boy in love with the clash of titans and destruction on a massive scale (he also has his moments of knowledge and opinion beyond...
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Sexting with emoji
(Talk of sexual bodyparts and sexual acts, but with symbols rather than pictures of carnal reality.) From the NYT‘s Fashion & Style section on the 14th, “Gaymoji: A New Language for That Search” by...
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More Magrittean disavowals
Today’s Zippy: (#1) One in a long series of Zippy strips about Tod Browning’s film Freaks, the characters in it, and the actors who played them (only some of them posted about here). Also one in a long...
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Bluto says: join or else
Aggressive days in the men’s underwear world, in my adaptation of a Daily Jocks ad from the 11th. There will be hot men in their underwear, suggestive captions, and a certain amount of syntax,...
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Annals of indirection
Chip Dunham’s Overboard strip from December 28th: (#1) Captain Crow and his dog Louie An exercise in both syntax/semantics and semantics/pragmatics: on syntactic constructions and their semantics, and...
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Ostentatiously playful allusions
(OPAs, for short.) The contrast is to inconspicuously playful allusions, what I’ve called Easter egg quotations on this blog. With three OPAs from the 4/20/19 Economist, illustrating three levels of...
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Locatives, inalienability, and determiner choices
All this, and more, in two recent One Big Happy cartoons, from 7/2 (I broke a finger — the determiner cartoon) and 7/4 (Where was the Declaration of Independence signed? — the locative cartoon). Both...
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Gloating over them apples
In an advertising poster, for actual apples: (#1) and on a tongue-in-cheek sticker, reproducing a gloat: (#2) Both incorporate phonological reductions of casual speech — ’bout for about, d’ya ([djǝ]...
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Contamination by association
(Regularly skirting or confronting sexual matters, so perhaps not to everyone’s taste.) Yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro takes us back to the Garden of Eden: (#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols...
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The Desert Island Psychiatrist
Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro combo is also a cartoon meme combo: Desert Island + Psychiatrist: (#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 7 in this strip —...
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Before or after?
In the 9/14/19 One Big Happy, Ruthie wrestles with a workbook question, apparently something along the lines of “Does 4th Street come before 6th Street or after it?”: (#1) There’s a lot packed in here....
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The library hookers and booze joke
The joke, which was new to me and entertained me enormously: (#1) Then, passed on my a friend yesterday, from Facebook, the joke supplied with a photo, the result then labeled as a “meme” (in my terms,...
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No offense (intended)
From the American tv series Emergency! S7 E11 “The Convention” (from 7/3/79), a tv movie following the regular series. Two women end up serving as a paramedic team together — female paramedics were a...
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