Language Log

While we're on the subject of English spelling: the 25 August New Yorker has a cartoon by Ariel Molvig on the subject:

And here's a related Rhymes With Orange cartoon from a while back:

From 17 March, Tom Brazelton's Theaterhopper cartoon, entitled "Horton Hears a Swear":

Two points of linguistic interest: the noun swear and the undernegated could give a shit, parallel to the famous could care less. Plus the misspelling of Dr. Seuss.

Two recent Zits strips touching on familiar themes: one on parent-teen communication and the wonderful modern world of communicating in many modes; and one on guy-girl differences in communication (reproducing stereotypes of women as socially sensitive and men as direct and socially inattentive).

The op-ed page of today's New York Times celebrates a notable anniversary, in a piece (with title as above) by Leonard Stern, Holly Gressley and Annemieke Beemster Leverenz that begins:

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Mad Libs, the _____ word game that the late Roger Price and I [Stern] accidentally created in 1958.

Under the blank is the label ADJECTIVE, indicating that you're supposed to fill in an adjective; you can fill in a predictable adjective, like wonderful or entertaining, or you can try for something fanciful. Or you can ask someone to supply the words without the context of the passage they're going to be slotted into, and enjoy the bizarre results.

The piece goes on to survey notable events of the past 50 years, with plenty of further blanks for you to fill in. Here's a Candorville cartoon from May (hat tip to Ned Deily) that exploits the format for a bit of social commentary:

David Malki's Wondermark takes on grammar peeves:

(Hat tip to Bruce Webster.)

Today's Cathy:

(As usual, click on the image for a larger version.)

From the New Yorker of 28 July, a cartoon by J.C. Duffy (p. 60), showing a man, working a cash register at a grocery store, who is addressing a shopper staring at the sign at his counter. The sign has "10 items or less" on it, with the "less" crossed out and "fewer" written in. Says the man:

“What can I say? I was an English major.”

Two things here: the usage of less and fewer in this context, which Mark Liberman took up here some time ago; and the stereotype of English majors as sticklers for "correct" grammar.

Dinosaur Comics for 7/28/2008 featured Gricean inference:

Today's Dilbert:

;

Yet another variation on the 1951 Damon Knight theme.

Today's Zits:

In today's Zippy, Bill Griffith is on top of coining:

Zippy explores the rustic dang and durn (roughly equivalent to damn and its substitute darn), wielding them in a variety of syntactic contexts:

The latest issue of the New Yorker (July 7 & 14) has a Roz Chast cartoon (p. 75), "seven words you can't say in a cartoon", that's a tribute to the late George Carlin and his famous "Filthy Words" routine, "seven words you can't say on television". All the "words" are strings of obscenicons (credit to Ben Zimmer for the coinage, an alternative to the blander cursing characters), those punctuation marks, stars, spirals, and the like that are used to compose representations of cursewords in cartoons. (We've posted here many times on obscenicons.)