Lost Consonants
A friend of mine has just sent me an e-mail, suggesting that my students try a long-time favourite of his, Graham Rawle’s Lost Consonants. This is a series of cartoons that has been running for years in the weekend’s print edition of the British daily The Guardian.
The cartoon has a fixed pattern. The caption, that’s the text underneath the image, always consists of a sentence that has one consonant missing, thus resulting in a new, absurd meaning. The image, pieced together from various photos, illustrates this new meaning. Start with an easy one: The birds found some wigs and were building their nests.
For more of that, click on “more of this”.
A word of warning, though: some of the cartoons are weird, and I’m not sure their humour always travels very well across cultural boundaries.
Thanks for the link, Pippo-san!
Comments
Those are fifteen minutes out of your productive life that you’ll never get back, Kevin.
The one that nearly beat me was The heart specialist recommended a tripe bypass. I’m not very well versed in surgical terminology but it eventually occurred to me that the underlying phrase was triple bypass, a complicated type of open-heart surgery.
I showed the series to an advanced non-native speaker of English; she found the captions a lot harder to crack than I would have expected.
Philippe :: April 23, 2004
Hi Ruedi. I like one the best that isn’t on Graham’s Website. It says: “Phil loved a drink but was developing a bee belly.”
By the way: Happy birthday to you!
Yes, the Bee Belly used to grace your fridge, which was always well stocked with canned beer.
Birthday? Thanks for reminding me …
It’s St. George’s Day!
Erik :: April 24, 2004
Hm… those comics are an acquired taste I think ;-)
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Dang, now you’re wasting my time. I spent fifteen minutes going through those! I’ll probably wind up going back too!
I really like this one.