Language Log

Zits returns every so often to teenage boys and their communication practices. Here are two recent strips:

This recent Family Circus cartoon shows Billy consulting a dictionary and being surprised at what it says about the word verb:

Why does Billy find this weird?

(Click for larger version)

Zippy produces an elaborate instance of the snowclone Are We X Yet? (see here for our last mention of the snowclone, in Zippy's "Are we playing “Risk” in an underground bunker beneath th’ White House yet??"), and Griffy replies with a variant of the proverb "If the shoe fits, wear it" (which the New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy says was originally "If the cap fits, …", possibly referring to a fool's cap).

(Click for a larger version)

After Bizarro and Zits, here's a little Zippy. (Click on a cartoon to get an enlarged image.) First, on languages (though, this being Zippy, it wanders):

(I'm reminded of Mel Brooks' astonished complaint about his time in the Army, stationed in France: everyone spoke French!)

And then a riff on the idea that expressions mean different things to different people:

Another cartoon roundup, this time from Zits (click on a cartoon to get an enlarged image):

A collection of Bizarro cartoons I've been accumulating for some time:

Classic KTD rant in a recent For Better or for Worse strip:

My colleague Tom Bever felt he had really hit the big time today when he learned that one of his example sentences had made it into the funny pages. Admittedly, it was in the linguistically hypersophisticated Dinosaur Comics (as usual, click on the image to see it full-size):

For a brief introduction to the example, try the Wikipedia article on garden-path sentences¹, or for a rather more thorough discussion, Chapter 1, section 4.2 of this on-line introductory neuropsychology coursebook, in which Tom is referred to as 'a famous psycholinguist'. [Aside to Tom: It's true! Big time! Quick, ask for a raise — my finder's fee is a mere 10%.]

Sheldon for 5/9/2008:

(Click on the image for a larger version, as usual.)

In my limited understanding of word-a-day products, they're not likely to give you multi-word noun phrases like "tempestuous bat guano", evocative or not. You might think that there's an unexploited market segment here, for evocative-noun-phrase-a-day calendars and other ENPAD properties. But on reflection, I think not — phrasal evocativeness is too individual.

In 1880, not long after the invention of the telephone, Mark Twain noted how weird a conversation is when you erase one of the participants ("That queerest of all queer things in the world", 3/25/2004):

I handed the telephone to the applicant, and sat down. Then followed that queerest of all the queer things in this world—a conversation with only one end to it. You hear questions asked; you don’t hear the answer. You hear invitations given; you hear no thanks in return. You have listening pauses of dead silence, followed by apparently irrelevant and unjustifiable exclamations of glad surprise or sorrow or dismay. You can’t make head or tail of the talk, because you never hear anything that the person at the other end of the wire says.

Now Dan Walsh, an "an Irish musician, artist, nerd and businessman" who blogs under the name of Travors, has applied this technique to a comic strip: Garfield minus Garfield.

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.

Yes, it's a three-comic morning.