Language Log

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.)

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?

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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).

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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.