I thought I'd start a thread where we could post any word related comics. I thought of arnie with this one!

Dinosaur Comics has a lot of language-related stuff, summarized here.

The Mother Goose and Grim strip has lots of wordplay. My favorite was a black bird with lots of junk stuck to it. It was the "vel-crow."
http://www.grimmy.com/comics.php
http://www.grimmy.com/comics.php

This is not comic, but maybe it fits here, since words are the weapons being used in this war.

Well, my link has already changed to today's comic, unfortunately, and that one isn't word related. It had been about the word moot.

Is there a way to post a comic that stays there? I've found it, but I don't know how to post it.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kalleh,

Is there a way to post a comic that stays there?

I pressed the previous link, and then copied the URL for that page: link.

I love this Schadenfreude cartoon that was posted on a Blog.

I bet you loved the commentary after the cartoon, too, especially this quote.

quote:

The first is "epicaricacy" which is a rare English word (why do we always stop using the best words??) that was once spelled "epicharikaky". The Greek etymology of this word is a compound of epi (upon), chaira (joy) and kakon (evil). Whoo-hoo! I love it!

Little does he know...little do most know. I get Google Alerts for the use of "epicaricacy," and it's usually people who've not heard of it, and they get so excited.

Now, I did get an alert today (I am getting more these days; three today) where the person used it correctly, but the post is very political and really quite disgusting. I'd not want to link to it, and I'd have to check out its accuracy before I did.

This isn't word related, but it surely is appropriate in these hard economic times .

Although it's not a word related strip one of my favourites is Garfield minus Garfield which I think I have mentioned before. It's the one where Dan Walsh has (with the approval of Garfield creator Jim Davis) removed everything apart from Jon Arbuckle from the strip leaving a portrait of a sad, lonely disturbed young man struggling to cope with life.
I mention it now because it's just wiped the floor with everything else in an internet poll.

Apart from the "young" I identify completely with him.

It may not be to everyone's taste but it is to mine. My favourite is the one for 12th January, but I like most of them.

I loved it, Bob.

Entelechy

Skin Horse

Well, no it doesn't... but it would have been a great bluffing game word.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BobHale,

I confess that I am not a great lover of comic strips - but then many UK newspapers don't carry them (or at least, not full pages of regular characters).

Probably the only cartoonist whose work I used to seek out (and the only reason I used to buy the Daily Express) was the late and very great Giles (actually his name was Carl Giles - but nobody ever called him that). See here http://www.gilescartoons.co.uk/ and here http://www.cartoons.ac.uk/artists/carlgiles/biography

Can't say that I've heard of entelechy.

There were 2 word related comics today that I liked. In the first Pickles comic, they talk about learning a new word every day (though you must learn its meaning too!)...today's was plinth. I didn't know it; Shu did.

The second is a Mister Boffo comic where they talk about the origin of Ponzi. That comic has stimulated me to look up the real etymology of the word!

Today's Cathy comic relates the economic situation to.... grammar.

Most UK newspapers (the more serious ones anayway) don't have comic strips. I'm not sure whether I am pleased or saddened by that fact

Many of our serious ones don't, either. I read both types.

Today's Sherman's Lagoon says a lot about our evolving language.

Good, Kalleh, but more really about how language is used than how it is evolving, don't you think?

Try replacing the crab in the cartoon with Humpty Dumpty.

Try replacing the crab in the cartoon with Humpty Dumpty.

Right, if you're going to steal, steal from the best. My immediate thought was "Crab. n. A large egg which has stability problems and is oftentimes tumbling off of walls on which it sits."

quote:

Good, Kalleh, but more really about how language is used than how it is evolving, don't you think?

Maybe. I thought the comment "pretty soon everybody will be saying it! Just you wait and see!" interesting, and it showed that if you wait awhile you can make the usage of a word change. I suppose we've seen that most in IT.

That explains it.

The link is to the current strip which has changed.

You meant to post this one.

I still haven't learned how to post links to comics that stick...or better yet to post the actual comic.

how to post links to comics that stick

Well, if you're looking at today's comic, and you'll notice that the URL is simply the domain name without any further directories or numbers and file extensions to the right of the name, you can be sure that that link is only good on the day you're reading the comic. You can do one of two things depending on how they've organized things on the site. (1) Right-click on the strip itself and choose view image. Then cut and paste the URL to your post; (2) Go to the archives (or pick a date on their mini-calendar) and then come forward to todays day, and cut and paste the URL. That's how I do it. If all that is too complicated, then wait for the next day, find the old comic, and cut and paste that URL to the post.

A warning, though Kalleh. Don't post the comic as an image, using the URL of the graphic. That's called 'hot-linking', and is frowned upon as it uses up their server's bandwidth without anyone accessing the site itself. Often sites will use blocking tactics to stop people doing this.

We've talked about this subject before.

Probably of special interest to Kalleh.

From Questionable Content via Language Log: The Germans have a word for it.

I thought Wordcrafters would enjoy this "Get Fuzzy."

I think PETA will picket that strip for cruelty to gerbils.

Loved this word-related Pickles.

Define benign.

Or in the words of the, sadly mortal but never forgotten, Peter Sellers,

"In our bosums bold, becalmed, benign
Lies Balham, four-square on the Northern Line.

See here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RTWk9QIKS0 - for a reading of the full work "Balham, Gateway to the South" - the poem itself comes towards the end at 4.99 in.

I wonder whether the humour is truly understandable by those who have never had the dubious pleasure of visiting SW17.

I've not been to Belham, but I wonder why the pleasure of a visit there would be dubious (link). Is it the yuppies or the Pakistanis who are blighting the area?

Balham's not so bad. There are plenty of worse areas of London suburbia. I doubt that it's being blighted by any particular group, although like almost all areas of London house prices have risen. The 'ordinary working-class' Balhamite has therefore been supplanted by the middle classes. However, again, this is common throughout suburbia.

As Arnie says, it's not all that bad - it's just a very mundane part of London's suburbs. Peter Sellers's eulogistic travelogue is more funny if you have been to the place and experienced its borinness.

I enjoyed the comics today, and thought these were appropriate to this board.

1) Mister Boffo's truth in advertising comic ( link)

2) Non Sequitur's stereotyping comic ( link)

3) Shoe's "books are so last century" comic ( link)

Yes, I use Shoe's book on carpentry in the very same way often. Right now I'm staining a coffee table but my wife says it shouldn't be with real coffee.

One of my all-time favorite stips was the Shoe episode showing the Wizard in the tree with Cosmo, staring down at his computer in pieces on the ground. Cosmo says to Wiz, "Late 20th Century technology just met early 4th Century RAGE!"

quote:

2) Non Sequitur's stereotyping comic ( link)

I don't know about the banking industry, since those criminally incompetent senior managers who got us in the financial mess we are in have kept very low profiles so we don't know what sex they are - but there are plenty of examples of women leaders who have dragged their countries into wars.

Incidentally, I find it fascinating how the comic strips in US papers seem to unite the nation since, it seems to me, the same in most papers. There is no parallel in UK papers since the relatively few comics that do appear are generally unique to the paper in which they appear. If there is a syndicated page of comics that appears in several UK papers then I have yet to find it.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Richard English,

I even learned a new word from a Snoopy comic today, though my friend says it's a fairly common word in England: foolscap. Apparently it is a cheap paper and gets its name from the watermark on such paper. I tried to see what that watermark looks like, and this picture came up on Google. Link

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
I even learned a new word from a Snoopy comic today, though my friend says it's a fairly common word in England: foolscap. Apparently it is a cheap paper and gets its name from the watermark on such paper. I tried to see what that watermark looks like, and this picture came up on Google. Link

It's common in Canada too. I had no idea of the etymology.

It's more the paper size that we know as 'foolscap'. It's not used much nowadays, apart from filing systems. As Wikipedia says, it's slightly larger than standard A4 size paper, so is usefully sized to prevent damage to the edges of the paper.

Before the international standard was adopted in 1959 it was the usual paper size used in offices and the like. When I started work in 1965 much of the stationery was still foolscap.

foolscap

I am familiar with it, but most probably in a British context. As with many words, there are multiple meanings. Foolscap, as arnie described it, measured 17 × 13.5 inches (432 × 343 mm). Foolscap folio measured 8.5 by 13.5 inches (215.9 mm × 342.9 mm). This corresponds roughly to what is called legal in the USA. This latter size was cut from the larger full foolscap (link).

I see it was a WWFTD word today. I guess he got it from the Peanuts cartoon, but I'd like to think that he got it from Wordcraft.

BTW, here is the Peanuts comic. ( link)

There were two common paper sizes in Britain when I started word - foolscap and quarto. Foolscap was a little longer and not so wide as A4; quarto rather smaller than A4.

I too had heard that the name foolscap came from the watermark used by the original producer of that paper size. And it was the size, not the quality, that the name referred to.

I suspect a few Wordcrafters could have been this student: Link