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Romper buddies
Taking off from a delightful ad for Romperjacks on Facebook back in November and December: Here I give you the ad photo, and inventory some of the things it inspires me to write about in future...
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The compounds of commerce and the comics
A little study in N + N compounds in English, their great utility and versatility (they pack a lot of content into two-word expressions), and their consequent massive potential ambiguity (so that...
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Breaking through the wall
Today’s Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange strip is a play on specific American tv commercials (with some gentle old-age mockery folded in), so will be baffling to any reader who doesn’t recognize the...
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CalWord: the Calvin Theory of Word Use
(the commencement of September) The Calvin and Hobbes comic strip from 9/1/92, reprised in my comics feed on 8/30: (#1) We can achieve intergenerational incommunicability! Yes we can! Calvin...
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Where to door knock and cold call
… and, eventually, how to abracadabra things out of sight. Yes, it’s Verbing Day on AZ Blog! Politics and real estate: to door knock. It started on the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC on 10/11, with the...
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Snow tires
A classic Don Martin Mad magazine cartoon for the winter season, illustrating the utility and flexibility of N + N compounds in English — and also their enormous potential for ambiguity, which has to...
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Don’t call me a “creative”
Today’s (2/5/23) Doonesbury strip shows us artist J.J. Caucus and her husband Zeke Brenner in her studio, with J.J. fuming about being labeled a creative: (#1) “I’m a noun, not an adjective!” But then...
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DISNEY ON ICE
Well, the title pretty much gives the joke away. An outrageous (but phonologically perfect) pun in a Bizarro cartoon from 9/6/12: (#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbol in the cartoon — Dan Piraro...
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The definite article of salience
The Mother Goose and Grimm strip of 12/3/15 (lots of stuff hangs around on my desktop for a really long time), depicting a canine guardian of the gates of dog heaven: The definite article of...
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Why do you ask?
The One Big Happy strip that came up in my comics feed on 12/7/18 — the Ramona St. posting mill grinds slowly, very slowly — is all about pragmatics, in particular what we take to be the point of...
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