Language Log

Always on the lookout for catch phrases to play with, Zippy looks into the world of electronics, with little success:

Bill Griffith rarely makes things up, and he's mostly on the mark here: "iTunes user interface", "Thrustmaster glow-saber duo pack", "full voice chat", and "open-world gaming" are all attested. Only "branched venue progression" fails — but Griffith clearly meant "BRANCHING venue progression", which is attested.

Over the years we've written many times about the disparagement of adjectives and adverbs by writers and usage advisers, most prominently in Strunk and White's "Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs" (The Elements of Style, p. 71). Now Jef Mallett has taken the matter up in his comic strip Frazz:

(Hat tip to Andrew Hatchell.)

Last week a truce was brokered in the great Philadelphia Alt-Weekly Battle over Meh. But fresh fighting has broken out on the webcomic front. Here's today's Overcompensating strip from Jeffrey Rowland (click to expand):

Meh has its supporters, particularly among fans of "The Simpsons" (see this piece by Mark Peters for more Simpsoniana). But in his comment on the Overcompensating strip, Rowland has a retort to the pro-Simpsons crowd:

I know it started with a Simpsons episode. So did "don't have a cow man." People had the good sense to knock that crap off though.

(Hat tip, Dan Holbrook of Language is the People's, who notes that Rowland is no stranger to word rage.)

Zippy and a stranger on the street puzzle about the fictional, the actual, and the real, somewhere in New Jersey, or at least the idea of New Jersey:

Zits returns to a familiar theme, the presumed chattiness of women, especially young women.

Folk sociolinguistics lives on, sturdily.

As I read the text of Rob Balder's latest PartiallyClips strip, about whether magic is perhaps secretly taught in universities, I experienced a moment of terror over whether linguistics was going to turn up in the third panel. But our discipline dodged the bullet. Check it out.

Out of context, many interjections merely express strong emotion, which could be either positive or negative, and intonation won't clarify things. And sometimes, even the context doesn't make the interpretation clear, as in this Zits cartoon:

As preface to today's taboo-language story, an Ariel Molvig cartoon from the latest New Yorker:

The story is a column by Adam Liptak in the Week in Review section of today's New York Times: "Must It Always Be About Sex?", about the word fuck, which the Times is committed to avoiding — so that if Liptak is going to report on a current U.S. Supreme Court case about this word, he has to do some deft side-stepping.

Another cartoon (Zits) on conveying various things via dude (this time in combination with facial expressions). We posted quite a bit on the topic a while back; see discussion of an older Zits cartoon here and of another all-dude conversation here.

… with profanity as its pinnacle:

Well, maybe we could treat profanity as a sub-area of pragmatics.

(Hat tip to Christine Wilcox.)

Another in our series of occasional postings on Noam Chomsky in cartoonland.

Two more takes on teenage communication. First, a Bizarro playing on the widespread idea that teenagers' texting is packed with non-standard spelling and punctuation. Then a Zits on communicative multitasking. (Click on an image to get a larger version.)

Irregular Webcomic has its own view of the U.S. presidential debates:

(Hat tip to Bruce Webster.)

More drama here than we've seen in the actual debates.