Quantcast
Channel: Language and gender – Arnold Zwicky's Blog
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 102

Fixing things

$
0
0

This morning’s Zits, in which Jeremy responds to his mother’s call for help:

Note the facial gestures, and the subversion of the mother’s request, in which Jeremy does not in fact take out the garbage, but does what strikes him as less work — though it makes a major mess.

In humor of all kinds, including comedy movies as well as comic strips, men are stereotyically given to “fixing” things in creative ways, either to avoid work they don’t want to do or to show off their supposed competence in some culturally male domain. In the second class, we have Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau in the movie The Pink Panther (1963) (warning: the clip is very loud at the beginning; adjust your sound):

This clip also shows Clouseau’s remarkable phonetics (everybody’s vowels vary a good bit, even in this short clip) and a little bit of non-native syntax.

 



Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 102

Trending Articles