Tintin Forums

labrador road 26
Well, this was strange I get a point for answering a question I didn't understood.
Well done, anyway, labrador road 26!

yamilah
What about erstwhile artist = artist of the old time?
As Balthazar has pointed out, that isn’t what it means, it means someone who was previously an artist, and then became something else (e.g. “U.S. President Ronald Reagan, erstwhile actor, was shot by John Hinkley, a movie-fan…”). So no matter how hard people wrack their brains looking for “erstwhile artists” who made pots, or whatever, you mean one thing while they search for another - it is very frustrating.

Likewise, your comment about people not having queried your use of the word “pun” before: actually I did - here - “there is no pun”. We argued the toss for ages, as you tried to make “sympathique” sound like “cinq pattes”, and ignored my counter proposition that it might as readily (should one be able to swallow the idea that it is any sort of pun in the first instance) be “son sympathique/ sans cinq pattes”.

But that clearly was an attempt at using the term correctly, albeit that no-one seemed to agree with you unreservedly, and the discussion was over whether the term described what was written/ drawn. Now you appear to want to dismiss the query over whether your question was correct or not, by justifying it on former usage. That doesn’t follow: before you used the term correctly; now you haven’t, or are using it in some non-standard way.

In both 'puns', the 'translated words' are connected with smiles or laughters, hence can be considered as plays on words or puns, but of a special kind.
To be precise, they would be better named avatars, as both 'thieving magpie' and 'omelette/tortilla' imply a 'metamorphosis into something else', into some 'explained and translated' avatar:
- the opera turns into a real-life bird
- the omelette turns into a thief's name.

'Erstwhile artist' actually meant -quite wrongly as it seems, sorry about that- an artist 'of the old time', whose name can be turned into a 'potter' by translation -he is not a potter himself, but a draughtsman-writer.

yamilah
In both 'puns', the 'translated words' are connected with smiles or laughters, hence can be considered as plays on words or puns...
No! Plays on words, maybe; puns, in no sense whatsoever. Please, do yourself a favour - just accept that you didn't understand what a pun is. There's no shame in that!

yamilah
...but of a special kind.
Only if "special kind" means "non-existent kind"! You've already mangled the meaning of the word "pun"; don't mangle the meaning of the word "special" as well.

yamilah
To be precise, they would be better named avatars...
No! To be precise, they'd be bettter named "translations" - a perfectly good and easily-understood word. Calling them "avatars" would be most imprecise, since avatar has its own specific and quite different meaning in standard English (the descent of a deity etc to earth in bodily form), regardless of what it might have come to mean in the obscure language of academic critical analysis or in the even more obscure language of yamilah-speak! ;-)

yamilah
the opera turns into a real-life bird
But it's already a real-life bird in the narrative of the opera. Admittedly for Tintin (who doesn't know he's in a fictional world himself), this is a translation of Rossini's fictional magpie into the real magpie that lives in the woods of Marlinspike, but I don't think that counts as a "metamorphosis into something else" as you claim. Both are magpies.

yamilah
the omelette turns into a thief's name.
To be precise, since you're keen on precision, the omelette translates into tortilla, which turns out to be a thief's name. Nothing turns into a thief's name.

I offer all this in a helpful spirit, and I hope I've prevented myself from being a trifle short with you again!

yamilah
In both 'puns', the 'translated words' are connected with smiles or laughters, hence can be considered as plays on words or puns, but of a special kind.
Now you are once more concocting completely arbitrary conditions to satisfy your proposition, and what’s more, you have to designate it a special kind of pun; just recently it was apparently a homographic pun, which whilst not the most common, is at least a recognised form.

To be precise, they would be better named avatars,
Hmm - if that were so, why did you use pun?
And, just for clarification, do you mean by avatar “the descent and presence on earth of a deity in corporeal form” or “the virtual representation of a real participant in an activity, in a Virtual Reality environment”?

both 'thieving magpie' and 'omelette/tortilla' imply a 'metamorphosis into something else', into some 'explained and translated' avatar
No, that’s just a convoluted way of stating the obvious word-play, which is overt, and not implied.

Note: I must have posted at the same time as Balthazar - it seems we have the same definition of avatar. Apologies for the repetition!

'Pun' was used to make it simpler to please everyone, and as expected it doesn't, for nobody can please everybody...
In Tintin's original first frame, Herge announced he would tell about Tintin's avatars, contrary to the Adventures announced 6 days before.
I'm afraid trying to find how Herge's avatars operates is nothing but the beginning of kind of a 'tracking game'...

Maybe Herge's avatars = puns = special puns = homographs = homophones = translations = homonyms = metamorphosises = characters, etc, provided they can be crossmatched or connected to each other in some way or other, e.g. via text and image, as in a rebus?

Maybe such a system is very simple and very complicated at one time, just like what Haddock explains by the end of 'The Land of Black Gold'?

yamilah
Pun' was used to make it simpler to please everyone, and as expected it doesn't, for nobody can please everybody...
But it hasn’t pleased anybody, which really is a different matter - if you arbitrarily apply terms, then nobody can understand them: how is anybody to know that you have done it?

And to ascribe no less than eight meanings to “avatar” (none of which I recognize as a meaning of the word) is patently absurd: you are applying equivalence, where little or none exists. A simple definition of what you mean when you use the term would suffice.

Maybe such a system is very simple and very complicated at one time, just like what Haddock explains by the end of 'The Land of Black Gold'?
This is just a contradiction in terms, and does nothing to advance the discussion, really. In reality things are one or the other.

yamilah
In Tintin's original first frame, Herge announced he would tell about Tintin's avatars

You're right, but Hergé was writing in French of course. I've checked in several on-line French-to-English dictionaries and one French meaning of the word is indeed "metamorphosis" - the meaning that I'm assuming you've been giving it all this time (on this English-speaking website). However I also found that avatar's other, possibly more common French meaning is simply "misadventure" (mésaventure in French, I think). So perhaps this is all Hergé meant by the word. You'll argue, no doubt that Hergé deliberately chose a word which meant the both things. (Avatar really is a homograph, it seems!). Well, I'd argue that if he'd known his choice of word "avatar" would - seventy-something years later - send you off on a wild goose chase through his life's work looking for a non-existent universal rebus, he might have opted for the less misinterpretable word "mésaventure" instead!


yamilah
Maybe Herge's avatars = puns = special puns = homographs = homophones = translations = homonyms = metamorphosises = characters, etc

Hmm. Saying "everything equals anything that fits my current argument" is certainly a good way of never having to question the accuracy of your own statements or the validity of your own theories, but it doesn't seem very intellectually rigorous, and we wouldn't want to be anti-intellectual. Under your system, does black equal white, wrong equal right, and night equal day? Due to the forum's quite proper restrictions on over-colourful language, I can't spell out what "elbow" would equal, but I'm sure members will get my drift and agree that the word would sum up this school of critical analysis nicely.

Balthazar
I also found that avatar's other, possibly more common French meaning is simply "misadventure" (mésaventure in French, I think).
Ah! Now that makes sense! I can understand that, and I didn’t even need to count Snowy’s paws or anything! Thanks for clearing that up! Occam’s Razor prevails!

Balthazar
"yamilah
Maybe Herge's avatars = puns = special puns = homographs = homophones = translations = homonyms = metamorphosises = characters, etc
is a partial quote that fits your own current argument!

A true intellectual honesty should imply the full quote:

Maybe Herge's avatars = puns = special puns = homographs = homophones = translations = homonyms = metamorphosises = characters, etc, provided they can be crossmatched or connected to each other in some way or other, via text and image, as in a rebus?

You're right. I'm very sorry for not giving full quote. I wasn't deliberately trying to misrepresent what you were saying by leaving off the qualifying "provided they..." section of your sentence, but I can how it's had that effect.

That said, I think my argument still has validity even when applied to your full sentence. I don't think two things can be said to "equal" each other simply "provided they can be crossmatched or connected to each other in some way or other, e.g. via text and image, as in a rebus." Not unless "equals" = "connected to", which it doesn't.