The Linguistics of Strange Planet

Nathan W. Pyle’s webcomic series Strange Planet is a fresh take on the quirks of human society, from the perspective of puppy-eyed, blue-skinned beings who explain all the strange things they do in a slightly-too-literal way. For example, two of the beings drink tea. One observes: “It appears you poured hot liquid on some old leaves.” The other offers “sucrose crystals” to add to the “hot leaf liquid”, and their partner requests “several thousand”. In another comic, one being presents another with a “primitive light source”, that requires an additional tool to turn on, “not super bright (unless you knock it over and it destroys all it touches)”, that “smells like food” (but is not!). Have you ever thought that way about a candle?

Strange Planet has almost two million followers on Instagram, after only sixty comics published in the span of about two months. Clearly, the English-speaking world finds these wonky alternative takes on ourselves highly amusing. I do, too, and as I browsed through the comics, I noticed a few things about the way the blue beings speak that probably contributes to their popularity.

First, and most important, is that the humor is derived from taking advantage of the “view from the outside”; that is to say, the comedy comes from looking at the ordinary from a radically different perspective. It deconstructs a lot of things we take for granted in life and social behavior and reveals how, if we weren’t already so accustomed to them, we would also find them bizarre. To highlight this approach, Pyle uses the setting of an ostensibly alien planet and naive, easily-enthralled characters. These are the basics of a genre known as satire. Think Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, or The Colbert Report: fictional people and places that remind the audience quite a bit of home…

Second, Strange Planet‘s blue creatures speak with an unusual vocabulary and sentence structure. Now, they use English, and most of their words are commonly known (though see the third point below about coinages). It’s just that they’re used in a way that native American English speakers won’t be accustomed to. Instead of, “Your eyes look bigger” (thanks to some mascara), one creature declares, “Your eyes are now more of your face.” Instead of, “You’ll spoil your appetite,” the parent scolds, “You will diminish your sustenance needs”. The effect is partly that of non-native speakers trying to use English in a stilted, too-formal way, and partly a mild critique of pragmatics, or the way in which language users decide not just what to say in order to be truthful and understood, but how to say it. The blue creatures’ speech plays fast and lose with Gricean maxims, yet because we can still figure out what they are trying to communicate, we find it funny.

Third, Strange Planet‘s blue creatures are very creative in their nomenclature. They call tears “face fluids” and ice cream “frozen thickness”. I went back through every published comic so far and took note of the funny compounds. All of them are easy to parse: calling teeth “mouth stones” makes sense and also makes you aware of them in a different way.

Now, I’ve been teaching a course in morphology, which is the study of the structure of words, and in my class we talk a lot about compound words. In English, most compound nouns are considered “right-headed”: the word on the right is the object in question, and the word on the left describes it. A racecar is a type of car, not a type of race; a shitstorm is a type of storm (albeit metaphorical); etc. The nouns below from Strange Planet all follow this pattern:

leafbucket – salad
lifegiver – parent
mouth stones – teeth
bloodpump – heart
criss cross flop disk – waffle
frozen thickness – ice cream
face fluids – tears
hydration cylinder – glass of water

And my personal favorite: “hot bird water”, or chicken soup (Lindsay would be proud!). Besides the ambiguous “doughslice” to mean toast (hard to tell whether the object in question is dough or a slice), there’s nothing innovative about these coinages apart from their literalness.

But then you have nouns such as “rollsuck” (vacuum cleaner) and “letdown” (reverse pushup). These are both nouns that are derived from verbs. While “letdown” is already a word in English, this usage creates a new definition that is more literal (and also a direct opposite of “pushup”). Two similar verb-adverb compounds used as nouns are “(hot liquid) sitdown” (bath) and “steer-close (window)” (drive-through window).

But I’m struck by “rollsuck”, because the two words that comprise it are both verbs. Double-verb compounds in English (e.g., blow-dry, stir-fry, copy-paste) are not as common as any kind of noun compound, so when I came across “rollsuck” and “sit-running” (horseback riding), I paid attention. Same goes for right-headed noun-verb compounds used as verbs; I found two: “handpush” (massage) and “mouthpush” (kiss), which join a small but lively club (e.g., bushwhack, brainwash, babysit). Although few readers of Strange Planet are likely paying attention to the structure of these compounds, I think that their liberal and creative use in the blue creatures’ vocabulary contributes to the overall comedic effect.

By the way, note that most of the verbs described above are all right-headed, just like the nouns, and are also used as nouns in the comics. Because English is very susceptible to conversion (or antimeria), verbs can be used as nouns and vice versa. The two exceptions are the verb-adverb compounds “letdown” and “sitdown”, which are left-headed and thus cannot as easily be converted into verbs. “Rollsucking” with a “rollsuck” is easy to say, but “letdowning” fifty “letdowns” is awkward.

An additional quirk that I noticed while doing this research is that Pyle’s use of oddball double-noun compounds such as “face fluids” was dominant in the first dozen comics, but the use of unusual verb compounds such as “rollsuck” and “handpush” comes up more frequently in the recent ones. I would love to see if this trend goes anywhere; it could reflect an interesting chronological development in the Strange Planet lexicon.

I’ll just end with one more Strange Planet neologism that I liked: “pre-star” (before sunrise), an adverbial prefix attached to a noun, used to remind us that the sun is indeed a star and that our (strange) planet orbits it!

@nathanwpylestrangeplanet

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Word of the Day: fire moose, a double-noun compound used by my students at Swarthmore to describe the loud blaring horn that alerts the campus volunteer fire department to an emergency. When I was a student, I’d never heard that term, having just used the simple “fire horn” myself. When I asked my peers, they recalled using such colorful monikers as “Dying Elephant Bird”, “Great Thunder Goose”, “The Whale/Wail”, and my personal favorite, “Horn of Gondor”.

Interestingly enough, many of my friends actually didn’t know what they had called it, even though all of us instantly knew what I was referring to. It’s a strange feeling when you can perfectly describe an object or phenomenon but not be able to remember if you had a name for it. It seems as if at some point after 2012, someone came up with “fire moose” on social media, the name caught on, and now my students can’t even imagine there ever having been multiple unofficial names to choose from.