Clash of Civilizations
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In some alternative history, according to the webcomic Teaching Baby Paranoia:
(Click on the image for a larger version. If your screen is too small, this may not work — in that case, try right-click>>view image or your browser/OS equivalent.)
David Brooks has so far missed this one.
[Hat tip: Neil Cohn]
Marc Hamann said,
July 10, 2009 @ 11:14 am
I thought footnote 1 was surprising:
It seems more accurate to me to reverse the direction: "how culture affects language."
[(myl) The footnotes are even more disconnected from our current space-time continuum than the strip is…]
Yuval said,
July 10, 2009 @ 11:48 am
It appears the sole purpose of the footnotes is to remove all humor from the comic.
Ideología y… ¿orientación de lectura? « Biolingüística said,
July 10, 2009 @ 1:25 pm
[…] blog, traduzco a continuación un cómic comentado por Mark Liberman en Language Log (ver el post aquí). El mismo trata sobre ciertos estudios sociolingüísticos realizados en el siglo XIX en la […]
rpsms said,
July 10, 2009 @ 1:46 pm
His strips are more art piece than humor comic.
The footnotes make an end-run around incredulity.
rootlesscosmo said,
July 10, 2009 @ 3:53 pm
The intent is certainly humorous. See, for example:
http://www.tragi-comix.com/tbp/archives/tbp489.html
Dan Lufkin said,
July 10, 2009 @ 10:39 pm
Ah, a chance (if I may use the word in this sense) to plug a book that I'm reading with much enjoyment: In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent. It's a history of attempts to straighten out human thinking by inventing a language that permits only logical thought, from John Wilkins' Philosophical Language (1668) to James Cooke Brown's Loglan(1960) and beyond. The list includes 500 invented languages with Klingon, Elvish and Þrjótrunn among the recent arrivals. The author has a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Chicago, but the book is very entertaining nevertheless.
Forgive me if everyone but me knows about this already.
chris said,
July 11, 2009 @ 12:13 am
According to Lemuel Gulliver, this kind of writing was standard in the early eighteenth century for both Lilliputians and "Ladies in England". It doesn't seem to have made any of them measurably less obstreperous.
dr pepper said,
July 11, 2009 @ 12:46 am
Some members of the american lunatic fringe believe that you can defeat legal action against you by using the right verbal formulations. The most common version of this is claiming that the money you get paid is not actually "income", thus exempting yourself from having to pay income tax. One extreme version of this is the claim that words written in red and at an angle, have extra power. These beliefs, and others, are studied (and ridiculed) over at quatloos.com.