Language Log

There's a usage manual for comic book lettering: "Comics Grammar and Tradition", by Nate Piekos, on the Blambot: Comic Fonts and Lettering site. Note that Piekos talks about these bits of advice as, in part, a matter of grammar, using "grammar" to refer to any system of conventions regulating form. In the introduction to the manual, Piekos describes it as a mixture of "established tradition" (as he perceives it; it's unlikely that he did any actual research) and personal aesthetic preferences — not unlike usage manuals for English and other languages:

Today's Grand Avenue:

The most recent xkcd:

This is such a good joke, and in retrospect such an obvious one, that it's hard to believe that Randall Munroe was the first one to tell it — but I can't find any precedents. Of course, "significant other" has only been in common use since the 1970s.

Last Sunday's Get Fuzzy:

As we've often observed, the semantic relationship between the elements of English complex nominals is very variable — consider for example olive oil, hair oil, and midnight oil. But my intuition, FWIW, says that "anger management" can't mean "management of angry people" — and not just because the phrase is already taken for another meaning. (Of course Satchel, who thinks that "jerk chicken" is a job description, is an amusingly unreliable lexicographer.)

Meanwhile, in other nominal news from unreliable sources, Daniel Schaefer in the Financial Times recently warned us about a German compound noun bubble ("The German language goes long"):

At first glance, Germany has avoided the sort of bubbles that have burst elsewhere. There was no house price inflation in a country lacking homeowners. Neither did the nation of savers have a decent credit bubble.

But beware. A dangerous bubble is taking over a country famed for its steadiness. The financial crisis and the notorious German Angst have combined to form an explosive boom: in compound nouns.

This verbal euphoria appears innocent when it comes to words such as Rettungsschirm (“rescue umbrella”), Rettungspaket (“rescue package”) or Kapitalspritze (“capital injection”). But it takes on ear-bursting brutality with words such as Abwrackprämie (“scrap premium”) – recently offered for trading in old cars to stimulate the automobile industry.

More worryingly, this passion for joining up nouns, albeit unlikely to spread around the world as fast as a subprime mortgage bond, is growing quickly in Germany.

Yesterday's Zits:

Griffy and Zippy play with the vocabulary of art supplies, and more:

(A crow quill in this context is a crow-quill nib, which — according to Mark Mandel, who's set me straight on this point — is "made of metal, presumably with the same line properties as a literal crow quill but more durable"; illustrated here. And Bristol is Bristol board/paper, a heavyweight paper used by illustrators.)

Two recent Zippy strips with some linguistic interest. The first seems irrelevant until the last panel, when we get yet another reference to Noam Chomsky in the popular media. (See this posting by Mark Liberman, with links to some of these earlier postings. Zippy throws in a Chomsky reference now and then, as here and here.)

The second also seems to have nothing to do with linguistics until the last panel, where we get a reference to languages with small phonemic inventories and cultures "with no concept of X".

Today's Get Fuzzy:

Today's Doonesbury:

In other news about mysterious Winter Solstice traditions, at least two of this morning's (American) comic strips feature a reference to the (British) observance of Boxing Day. Here's the take on it at Sally Forth:

A couple of days ago, I drove up to Los Angeles from my Language Log Plaza basement office in San Diego, for a quick visit with my grad school classmate Ed Keer. Ed lives in Philly (where Mark Liberman's swank executive suite is located), and was in LA on business. I've visited Ed a few times back East since I moved to California, but this is the first time he's come out here — he says his excuse is that he's got a "real" job and "kids" — so I felt it was worth the 5-6 hours of total driving time to have dinner with Ed (and two of his co-workers, as it turned out) and drive him to the airport to catch his red-eye flight back East.

Ed ended up missing his flight, which is why I thought he had announced to the (twittering) world that I am dead to him, but it turns out that he's just upset with me for not posting the latest in his comic series, Pigeontown. "Arnold posts Zippy and Mark posts Zits; why don't you post Pigeontown already?", Ed said to me, apparently while his plane was leaving the gate at LAX. So, in part to get myself back in Ed's good graces (maybe) but also because it happens to have actual linguistics content (about which see below the fold), here's the latest Pigeontown (click image to enlarge):

… now available here.

PC and Pixel for 12/11/2008 (link sent in by Michael Erlewine) :