Language Log

(This posting started from an attempt to replace all the links to James Thurber cartoons in Mark's "He bold as a hawk, she soft as a dawn" posting of 9/14/06, here, after the initial Dilbert cartoon, which is still available. All the links are broken, and Mark and I can't figure out which cartoons are supposed to go in which slots. So here's a big compendium of Thurber cartoons on the relations beween the sexes.)

Today's Doonesbury Flashbacks, 35 years ago (July 30, 1977): Trudeau here has made clever use of the fact that normally, with VP-ellipsis, the presuppositions of the antecedent VP are preserved …

Today's xkcd:

[Background: in inventorying postings with linguistically interesting cartoons, for a Language of Comics project at Stanford (directed by Elizabeth Traugott and me), the project intern has been unearthing postings from Language Log Classic whose image links no longer work. Here's one of Mark Liberman's from 2005 — "Illustrations" of 8/2/05, with two Get Fuzzy strips. I'm reproducing the posting here, with fresh, working links.

Back in 2005, we didn't have comments open on postings. But I've opened them now. Just remember: This posting is by Mark, not me. I'm just a typist.]

Yesterday's SMBC:

Today's Scenes from a Multiverse:

A recent New Yorker cartoon, courtesy of Paul Kendall:

The most recent SMBC:

Today's SMBC starts with a little lesson in phonetic dialectology:

Wondermark #829, 4/20, "In which pepper is explained":

The most recent Scenes From a Multiverse cleverly combines the intelligent design controversy with (an indirect form of) the Cretan liar's paradox:

In the most recent Between Failures, an nice example of a non-restrictive relative clause (or a supplementary relative clause, as Geoff Pullum would prefer) introduced by that rather than which:

From the most recent SMBC — the symptoms: