An unusually big crop of cartoons this morning, including one (a Rhymes With Orange) on stereotypes about men’s tastes (for Fathers Day). Plus another Zits with the stereotype of chatty teenage girls; another strip (a Mother Goose and Grimm) on Yoda’s syntax; a Zippy on synonyms for disapproving; and a Bizarro on the extension of metaphors to simulacra.
Comestibles for Dad in chocolate. A Rhymes:
(#1)
Liqueur-filled chocolates are commonplace; but beer? The rest are mostly meaty items. Then there are the nacho clusters.
Those chatty girls. Zits goes back, tiresomely, again and again, to the stereotype of teenage girls as prattling on about matters of no consequence, in a torrent of speech. Meanwhile, Jeremy is barely verbal at all:
(#2)
[Added 6/16/14: Mark Liberman has picked up this one on Language Log ("Sticky stereotypes", yesterday), with links to other LLog postings on chatty girls and laconic boys in Zits. On this blog, on chatty girls in Zits: 2/18/10, "Chatty Cathies"; 11/8/12, "Breathless". And on laconic boys there: 9/26/12, "Monosyllabism"; 4/5/13, "Finger talk"; 3/23/14, #2 in a collection.]
Again with Yoda. Mother Goose and Grimm on this durable topic:
(#3)
An earlier posting on Yodaspeak, with links to still more, is here.
Disapproving vocabulary.Zippy and Zerbina spin through a series of synonyms:
(#4)
What a turn-on!
Non-literal horses. Another very silly Bizarro in the desert:
(#5)
Carousel horses are only metaphorically horses.
(Note cowboy morphology (them ‘they, those’) and phonology (cain’t ‘can’t’).)
Bonus ‘toon. A Bizarro from the 12th that I didn’t get around to posting then:
(#6)
Instead of the command Speak!, the up-to-the-date alternative Text!
Speak!, as a command to a dog to bark is idiomatic (which is part of what makes the cartoon funny; but a command to a dog to text is funny on its own) — it’s metaphorical in origin, but has become conventionalized in this special use. (It can, of course, be created as a fresh metaphor at any time — Fido spoke fiercely — but then requires some interpretive work that Speak! ‘Bark!’ does not.)
