calque
Explanation
This single-panel comic shows one person angrily hurling linguistics terminology at another person as insults: "You calque! You dentalized yod-dropping infix! You scalar implicature! You fricative backformation! You clitic reduplicative acrolect!"
The caption below reads: "Discovery: linguistics jargon makes fantastic insults."
The humor is straightforward but effective: linguistics terminology, when stripped of its technical meaning, sounds remarkably like creative profanity. Words like "fricative" (a type of consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel), "clitic" (a morpheme that functions as a word but is phonologically dependent on another), and "calque" (a loanword created by literally translating parts of a foreign expression) all have a phonetic quality that makes them sound harsh, aggressive, or vaguely obscene to non-specialists.
The joke works because the terms are all real and correctly used in a grammatical sense — "dentalized yod-dropping infix" is a plausible (if unusual) combination of real linguistic descriptors — but when delivered with the cadence and fury of insults, they take on an entirely different character. A "calque" sounds like it could be a slur. A "fricative backformation" sounds like an anatomically creative curse. The comic exploits the gap between the dry, academic meaning of these terms and their visceral phonetic impact, celebrating the accidental poetic quality of technical jargon.