"… or you need to check your testosterone levels."

July 11, 2010 @ 12:01 pm · Filed by under Language and gender

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Shorter Louann Brizendine, from today's Non Sequitur:

July 11, 2010 @ 12:01 pm · Filed by under Language and gender


9 Comments

  1. John Lawler said,

    July 11, 2010 @ 12:10 pm

    "Stinky booger-brains". I like that; sums it all up nicely.

  2. ♅ said,

    July 11, 2010 @ 1:06 pm

    Common misconception about the origin of boogers.

  3. Scriptor Ignotior said,

    July 11, 2010 @ 11:55 pm

    Common misconception about the origin of boogers.

    Yes. OED, "pituitary":

    a. Of, pertaining to, or secreting pituita or phlegm; mucous.
    pituitary body, gland, †glandule, a small bilobed body attached to (and sometimes taken to include) the infundibulum at the base of the brain, partly synonymous with hypophysis 3, q.v., which has an important influence on growth and bodily functions; originally supposed to secrete the mucus of the nose; also applied to structures connected with this.

    Now that we speak of hormones – especially "human gross hormone".

  4. Steve Harris said,

    July 12, 2010 @ 4:39 am

    On the linguistics of common speech patterns, as evidenced in the strip:

    I had to read panel four about half a dozen times to make sense of it.

    "I suppose when you read a newspaper or watch TV, it's hard to disagree…"

    My first five readings, I couldn't make that ellipsis mean anything other than "hard to disagree with the newspaper or the TV", which makes no sense in context of the rest of that sentence and doesn't provide any sense for panel five. Finally it hit me: "hard to disagree with what you just said". And the "when you read" means "in light of the evidence obtained if you read".

    I think it's the "when" that threw me onto the garden path. This sense of "when"–not temporal, but "in consideration of"–is not something I've thought of explicitly before, though I daresay I've used it myself. I guess it's a product of "when in the course of…"

  5. Faldone said,

    July 12, 2010 @ 9:32 am

    I didn't have any problem with the fourth panel, it was the fifth panel and understanding why, ironically or otherwise, it disproved the theory.

  6. Mark P said,

    July 12, 2010 @ 10:09 am

    I also have to admit that it wasn't clear to me at first reading.

  7. Chad Nilep said,

    July 12, 2010 @ 5:54 pm

    I couldn't make any sense of the fourth panel until I read Steve Harris's explication de texte, and I'm still not sure I have it clearly. Does this assume or assert that the authors of newspaper and television content have high levels of testosterone, or more simply that they are men? or that media texts that appeal more to men than to women are more "dopey" than usual?

    As for the fifth panel, I think the notion of a "smart man" is meant to disprove the theory that males are dopes.

  8. sptrashcan said,

    July 13, 2010 @ 11:58 am

    I expanded panel 4 as follows: "by reading a newspaper or watching TV, you receive information which supports the theory that testosterone makes you dopey." This reading required no effort on my part. I suppose it's a turn of phrase I'm familiar with: frequently media consumption is used as a rhetorical stand in for being aware of world events, especially in a context where an opinion on the general state of human affairs is being affirmed as confirmed thereby.

    And indeed, when the opinion is being offered via the same media outlet as provides much of the viewer's information and outlook on the world, these affirmations often seem amazingly accurate…

  9. Yosemite Semite said,

    July 17, 2010 @ 4:47 pm

    As much as E. B. White is (justifiably) vilified here, his quote on humor and frogs is apropos.

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