Language Log

A recent xkcd cartoon looked back to the time when Pluto was demoted from being called a planet to being called a dwarf planet (where dwarf planets don't count as planets):

We posted extensively here on various aspects of the story. Today I'm going to return to the status of the expression dwarf planet.

Zippy's talking in catch-phrases again:

The Zippy take on the baleful effects of electronic communication:

Here, Bill Griffith mocks the alarm over what electronic communication is leading to, as discussed in David Crystal's new book Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, which Ben Zimmer has begun posting about here on Language Log.

Yes, it's Talk Like a Pirate Day. Here's David Morgan-Mar's Irregular Webcomic take on the event:

Pretty much every time I post a Zippy cartoon (most recently, here), someone writes to ask about Bill Griffith's spelling of the definite article the as th', as in

I know th' human being and th' fish can coexist peacefully!

The question was asked in the comments on my posting "Are we snowcloning yet?" back in June and was answered by other commenters there. The purpose of today's posting is to record the answer, with some commentary, so that I can refer future queries here.

The short answer is that Griffith is just representing the ordinary, reduced, pronunciation of the. The spelling th' is an instance of "eye dialect" (in a narrow sense), spellings (like wimmin for women) that represent ordinary pronunciations.

A nice blend from Get Fuzzy:

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Well, Spore is out, and a certain 12-year-old of my acquaintance is well into the tribal stage already. But there's an important evolutionary transition, identified in David Malki's latest Wondermark strip, that Will Wright hasn't allowed for:

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Mark Liberman's recent posting on the Cobot elicited some comments about talking in slogans. And now along comes Zippy, in catch-phrase dialogue with Griffy:

And from a while back, Dingburgers conversing in George W. Bush quotes:

The title attribute for the most recent xkcd strip has the value "Supercollider? I 'ardly know 'er", with apostrophes in place of the two initial h letters. This is a cultural mistake, a rare thing from Randall Monroe, who is usually pitch perfect.

A recent XKCD:

The "Russell and Whitehead" reference is to Russell's paradox, which raised a problem for naive set theory by bringing up the set of all sets that don't include themselves. The "Katherine Gates" reference is to the book Deviant Desires: Incredibly Strange Sex, 2000.

The image's title attribute has the value "They eventually resolved this self-reference, but Cantor's 'everything-in-the-fetish-book-twice' parties finally sunk the idea." This seems to be a evocation of another problem of self-reference, one leading to infinite recursion with an exponential explosion of fetishes at every step, rather than an endorsement of the maxim that "Once is cool, twice is queer".

Politicians, baseball stars, and other celebrities don't need this training. Nor do regular readers of Language Log. But for others, yesterday's Basic Instructions may be useful:

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Rob Harrell's Big Top comic takes on word aversion:

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The most recent Partially Clips strip:

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