Office Door Comics

I always notice cartoons posted on the office doors of faculty, and I enjoy the people who stop at my door and read what I've posted. This image is from the last bit of unclaimed office debris left over from a former adviser of mine. He passed while I was still at KU; he always had my tremendous respect, though I saw some element of our strained relationship in this cartoon. Even so, I'm hard pressed to explain it.

He spoke of Hermeneutics, and I remember this cartoon adorning his office for a decade.

I believe this posting is fair-use. The publication data I have is clearly visible. It is being used for educational purposes and it is re-purposed to illustrate teaching theory and vocabulary. But I invite anyone to criticize my use by reading the awesome free digital comic that explains copyright law by Keith Aoki, James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins at the site hosted at Duke University.

BTW: the scanned image data is (Sept. 7 1996 by O'nelly (?) Creators Syndicate Inc. speedbump@ compuserve.com).

Comic on Teaching

Found this on the Shoebox blog (a tiny division of Hallmark). It's consistently entertaining and occasionally useful.

plagiarism and copyright

image from the dilbert website at http://dilbert.com/ 9-2-10. Click to see full size image.

Web comix, cliches and colloquialisms.

Grammar discussions demand humor.

Taylor Mali, a teacher turned Slam Poet (he's been on Def Comedy Jam and Comedy Central), has great material on YouTube. His poetry (more stand up/ spoken word with a hip hop feel) rocks. See a collection of links . His rant on “what a teacher really makes” lifted my spirits, but his video on rhetoric and the loss of voice in contemporary culture is more relevant for students.

Victor Borge’s a phonetic punctuation system can lighten up a grammar discussion and teach mechanics. And for me it's practical; living in multilingual environments, I sometimes speak out punctuation to clarify meaning.

There's an online cartoon at http://www.bitstrips.com/series/34595/ that treats grammar. Web comix work better in the wiki than in the blog. The blog cuts off much of the content, but if you click on the image itself it will open up larger and in its entirety.

Also on the issue of tired language , Oxford researchers have released a list of the top 10 most irritating words or phrases in English. Not all of them are cliches, but...

And what is the difference between a cliche and a colloquialism?