McEldowney’s meaning for gink must be quite different from the one I am most familiar with!
The Urban Dictionary of course gives some dozen unrelated entries of varying plausibility, some of which could work in this cartoon context. (But none of which are exactly mine.) The slang section of dictionary.com is more sober, but the main American entry could work with the cartoon:
nounSlang: Sometimes Disparaging and Offensive.
a person; fellow.
Is that all there is to it? Or do you see a better fit for one of the other definitions?
Maybe this should be held until the next time we assemble an Oopsies list post. But even if the wording owes something to bad translation or the author not being a native speaker of English, it’s still hard to guess how anything even somewhat plausibly translatable this way could fuel a story or joke to go with the drawing. Hey, is that even un patito at all?
My guesses are that the Sporkula and Foon are made up, and that the Foodle was intended that way but in fact exists, under some other name. I think I’ve seen it used for lifting and serving spaghetti.
So clever! (But we may have to watch out for the pronunciation-guide people.)
Thanks to Bill R, who says “It’s like they’re daring us to figure it out”. Which is why there is a CIDU category (“tag”) on this, along with the “(Not a CIDU)” for the OYs list in general. Look, don’t question it too hard. Oh, and it’s not a pun really, but gets an OY as a language-related item. Also this list was sitting bare too long …
The usage they’re disputing over was taught in my schooldays as one of “those common mistakes to be avoided”.
OK, I think (but am not positive) that I get the alternate meaning the joke depends on — from too many crime shows, the best deals a defendant’s lawyer might hope to extract from a prosecutor would involve setting no additional jail time, so the defendant gets to “walk away” or “take a walk”.
First I thought the outside guy was wearing an odd bathrobe; but throw in his laurel wreath and I guess he is at a toga party. But not the inside guy. Oh well, it doesn’t seem to affect the joke.
Possible cross-comic banter, based on spelling of the name?
When I was growing up, and my dad and uncles were into car repair, front-wheel-drive was relatively rare, and most American cars had front engine and rear drive wheels. There was a very important part called the “differential” which sat at the rear end of the drive shaft and connected also to both sides of a rear axle and the drive wheels. The informal term used for the differential was “rear end”.
Since “rear end” was also an informal substitute for “butt”, there was occasion for many a scene just like the one in this cartoon.
This is inflation on count-to-ten.
Jane: I once went on holiday and pretended to be twins. It was amazing fun. I invented this mad, glamorous sister and went around really annoying everybody. And d’you know, I could get away with anything when I was my crazy twin Jane. Sally: But you’re Jane. Jane: Kinda stuck. It’s a long story.
And there was a sequel:
Link only, to a Far Side that shows the prequel to an iconic Meryl Streep line. (The link may not last long.)
Thanks to Usual John for sending this in, and for useful email discussion! His focus is on the bottom strip, where we get amusing literalized visions of some common idiomatic expressions. Except — we apparently no longer have an idiom to match “He had a pony on his cuff”. So, what would that mean, apart from what’s in the literal illustration?
By the way, can anyone assist my memory and give me a clue why I remembered this Origins of the Sunday Comics feature as not always in the past being a genuine historical exploration, but rather including sometimes a parodic or fictive-history take? Maybe mental contamination from reading a sometime series of posts in Working Daze, pretending to trace a century-long history of that strip, thru different writers and artists, and even titles and publishers.
Back in last November, in this “OY collection” post, we discussed a Baldo strip and the matching Baldo en Español where an element of the joke doesn’t come thru in the Spanish version, and combined this observation with other instances, as well as “About” tab type info and external sources, to agree that the strip seems usually to have been first written in English, then translated for the Spanish version.
(In that November post, if you feel like scrolling back, there was also a fun digression stemming from a different comic, on a style of word-play puzzle called by some “Dingbats”, a sort of text-layout rebus.)
In March, Arnold Zwicky’s Blog discussed a related example, with the same conclusion, where the English Baldo was about English language spelling and pronunciation (just pointing out that tough, cough, and dough give different sounds to the -ough sequence of letters) and the Baldo en Españoljust used the Spanish translations of those words, which really don’t resemble each other in any special way, certainly not rhyming. Zwicky also brought up some possibilities on how the Spanish version could have been handled. (And yes, that’s me popping into the comments.) .
Now lookit what just showed up on GoComics!
All the Spanish that you really need to know here is that pecado indeed means sin, and pescado means fish (as food).
In the English version, Tía Carmen’s jest is to turn the saying “Hate the sin but love the sinner” into “… love the dinner”. In Spanish she says “… love the fish [we are eating]” which is basically the same idea, but manages to preserve the word-play element because of the resemblance of pecado and pescado.
Comics I Don't Understand 