Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Encountered yesterday, this cartoon by Andy Singer:

  (#1)

The cartoon plays on the political slogans “Life begins at conception” and “Abortion is murder”, and incorporates a powerful cultural prejudice against masturbation (on the grounds that it’s non-procreative sex, and therefore unproductive, wasted effort — and, if you adhere to certain religious beliefs, against God’s law).

Andy Singer says on his website:

What follows are samples of NO EXIT– a self-syndicated cartoon drawn by me, Andy Singer. NO EXIT appears in dozens of newspapers, books and magazines in the U.S. and abroad.

His cartoons are mostly political, as above and here:

  (#2)

Portmanteau corporate names using cynic as a whole or its first part cyn-, combined with the -corp of corporation (cf.Unicorp), -ol ‘oil’ (as in petrol and in the South African oil company Sasol), and -ex (as in the Mexican oil company Pemex, or, more distantly, Fedex).

But not all are political. Here’s one that’s just silly:

  (#3)

The strip turns on an ambiguity in eat Chinese, specifically in the noun Chinese:

(1) Chinese ‘Chinese people’, as in “There were many Chinese / Indians / Italians in the audience’; this gives a savage reading for eat Chinese; or

(2) Chinese ‘Chinese food’, a nouning by truncation of the longer expression Chinese food, as in “Let’s eat / order / serve / take out Chinese / Indian / Italian”.

Go, bears.

(Earlier Andy Singer cartoon on this blog here.)

This entry was posted on October 10, 2012 at 7:17 am and is filed under Ambiguity, Language of sex, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Portmanteaus, Truncation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.