Period Speech
by Berg
Image Text: The same people who spend their weekends at the Blogger Reenactment Festivals will whine about the anachronisms in historical movies, but no one else will care.
Ah, language- the great social agreement of symbolic representation which enables someone like me, sitting in Los Angeles to communicate with someone like you, who I presume lives somewhere on the internet (nice place, by the way, but you should put your porn away before you have people over). Today's xkcd is about the inherent slipperiness of language, and how very little of what we say today will sound coherent to a future observer.
Consider English. Modern English is thought to have settled into it's current form (more or less) sometime in the 16th century. Before Modern English, however, were Middle English (mayhap you've heard of the Canterbury Tales?) and Old English (mayhap you've heard of Beowulf?). Middle English is close enough to Modern English that you can almost read it, but Old English is far enough away, linguistically, that it requires some study to be able to read.
The point xkcd is making, then, is that 400 years from now, bits of dialect and slang that to us seem quite disparate ("forsooth" is hundreds of years old, while "grok" entered the lexicon in '61) will seem quite similar to all but the most avid linguistic scholars. After all, if you were presented with 5th century slang and 9th century slang, chances are you wouldn't notice any difference.
Those who would notice the difference are addressed in the image text- they'll be the folks at the Blogger Reenactment Festivals. Those aren't a thing yet, but we can imagine that these would be fringe affairs, attended by only the most devoted of nerds (a term brought into the language by none other than Dr. Seuss in 1950). As such, their opinions as to the accuracy of slang presented in historical movies from the future represent the minority view, even if it is correct.
Analogies
by Jeff
Image text: I just call all of them 'synecdoche'.
Let's recap middle school English class, link style!
Metaphors are the comparison of one thing to another without the use of like or as : “A man is but a weak reed”; “The road was a ribbon of moonlight.”
Similies are a common figure of speech that explicitly compares two things usually considered different. Most similes are introduced by like or as : “The realization hit me like a bucket of cold water.”
A synecdoche is a figure of speech in which the one of the following (or its reverse) is expressed:
* A part stands for a whole
* An individual stands for a class
* A material stands for a thing
Dyslexics
by Jeff
Image text: And of course I had to redo this like three times because I kept writing 'UNTIE'; I kept doing 'doing 'doing it wrong' wrong' wrong.
The joke shirt is supposed to be "Dyslexics of the world Untie" because dyslexics mixed up the T and the I. In this case, the dyslexics were trying to make the joke shirt and mixed up the T and the I again because they are dyslexic.
Malamanteau
by Jeff
Image text: The article has twenty-three citations, one of which is an obscure manuscript from the 1490's and the other twenty-two are arguments on LanguageLog.
Malamanteau when in language, someone combines two words to create another different word. Perhaps, the most famous example of this is "misunderestimate" which was used by former US President George W. Bush.
However, "misunderestimate" might be more of a malapropism as it references in the comic because it was said as a mistake rather than a purposeful combination of two words. At least I hope it was a mistake...
Neologism is also defined as a new word that is created by combining two different words.
However, the word Malamanteau is itself a malamanteau because it is the combination of malapropism and portmanteau it is a neologism and a portmanteau. Which points then to the extreme confusion in the supposed Wikipedia article that this comic is showing.
I hope I made that more clear than more murky for you.
UPDATED: Probably more murky... There is some good discussion in the comments from people who know more about language than I ever will.
Literally
by Jeff
Image text: The chemistry experiment had me figuratively -- and then shortly thereafter literally -- glued to my seat.
Let's see if we can tease this one out. The character with the hair that pops out of the side of the first frame is the character standing next to the girl in the 7th grade flashback. The one speaking in the first frame is the leftmost character in the right group.
The hairy character misuses the word "literally", and one of his classmates calls him out on it. The hairy character follows the classmate waiting to get him back for misusing "literally". However, it takes 18 years and the hairy character seemingly neglects his personal hygiene in the process.
Here's the rule of thumb: unless it actually happened, do not use "literally".