Today’s Hindustan Times has an interesting pun (I am assuming it was intentional, though I won’t put my cash on it). For some reason, I find it weird, but at the same time it’s tough to say why.

One reason is that I usually associate the word toon with cartoon movies, not comic strips or paper characters. I checked this with a couple of online dictionaries, and they supported my intuition—

The Free Dictionary
toon

n. Informal

1. A cartoon, especially an animated cartoon.
2. A character in an animated cartoon.
WordReference Dictionary
toon
noun informal a cartoon film or character.

(I am aware that toon derives from cartoon—the point I am trying to make is that the shortened version is more frequently used for cartoon movies or characters and I won’t generally associate it with paper cartoons.)

So when I read this, I found it weird that a cartoonist has been described as drawing what are anti-car toons. Then I thought it was actually anti-cartoons. This I can interpret in at least three senses—something that acts against cartoons, like you have anti-tank missiles and anti-anti-tank missiles OR a cartoon that is somehow an antithesis of a cartoon, just like you have anti-jokes, and thirdly, a cartoon that is opposing something. And I thought that maybe they did intend the third meaning but the guy who did the layout split it into two lines but didn’t hyphenate it as there already was another hyphen and the second one so close to the first one would look clumsy. But then I read further, and saw that the whole thing was about a car-free day, so it made sense to talk of anti-car stuff. Including, probably, anti-car toons.

A small note of linguistic relevance—cartoon is a good example of a word that appears to have two morphemes (minimal meaning elements), car and toon, but in reality as only one (just like reply appears to be re and ply, but it isn’t, since you can’t say The buses_ have begun to reply on the old routes_). You might argue that it probably did originate as car+toon, but it hasn’t. Toon came from cartoon like infi comes from infinite. Cartoon comes from the French carton which comes from carta which is closer to words like card and chart in English rather than cars and toons. www.etymonline.com is a pretty reliable source for checking out etymologies.

So, smart pun or weird error? My head is spinning, so I will stop here.