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Herb and Jamaal, 9/13/13

OK, everybody, here’s the thing: when multiple negatives are strung together in a sentence the way that our faceless gumbo aficionado has strung them together in panel one, with the intent to intensify the negative sentiment rather than to have the negatives cancel each other out, that’s called negative concord. While this isn’t an accepted feature of high-status standard English today, it was common in old and middle English (and was extensively used by Chaucer), and is a feature of the high-status literary varieties of a number of other languages, including Portugese, Russian, Persian, and ancient Greek.

Now, arbitrary distinctions between dialects are made in every language ever spoken, so I’m not going on some quixotic quest to get negative concord back into standard English or anything, but I do have a gripe with people who pretend that dialectical uses of it are difficult or impossible to parse. People love to smugly point out that “I don’t got no money” logically means “I do have some money” — according to formal mathematical logic, which is very different from the logic that defines the grammar of naturally occurring spoken languages. But I would be very, very surprised if any competent native English speaker ever heared someone say “I don’t got no money” and genuinely believed that the speaker was claiming to have some money.

But (and here is my point) if you are going to go down this pedantic, narrow-minded, wrong-headed road, at least get your pedantry right. A double negative resolves to a positive. A triple negative resolves to a negative. You’re making yourself look dumb, Herb.

Gil Thorp, 9/13/13

Considering that some years the Milford bonfire is restricted to single glorious panel, I’m pretty excited about this fall’s installment being spread over multiple days! Even better is that this extra strip time gives us an opportunity to hear some Milford High students wax rhapsodically about the delightful smell of burning human flesh.

Blondie, 9/13/13

I’d give Dagwood a free sandwich if he showed up in that mask, wouldn’t you? I’d give him whatever he wanted. That thing is fucking terrifying.

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Sally Forth, 8/8/13

Aw — seems like just yesterday she was a cute little fifth-grader, and here she is ruining her first summer romance with a pointless, self-destructive neurotic meltdown. Little Hilary, all grown up!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/8/13

Wait! Tell us more about this “Charlie” player, cutting a wide swath through the maidens of Hootin’ Holler with his smooth talk, fancy ring, and bait-and-switch mating strategy. Is he unaware of the role played by firearms in his community’s courtship rituals?

Or perhaps Hootin’ Holler’s ancestral wimminfolk cobbled together their own ritual from scraps of Sadie Hawkins Day and Musical Chairs, in which eligible wimmin pass the ring down from one to another as one by one they wed, until at last the final maiden is doomed to wear it as she weds the Final Feller — the Feller No One Wants.

Yes, that must be it, judging from the look of shock, horror, and despair on Ginny’s face — it’s exactly how Loweezy looked wearing the ring at her own weddin’ a generation ago.

Mary Worth, 8/8/13

Swimming! Hiking! Stretching! A life of petty intrusiveness requires constant discipline. Not for the weak!

Herb and Jamaal, 8/8/13

Jamaal lives every day as though it were his last, and reeks so bad everyone around him wishes it were theirs.

— Uncle Lumpy

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Archie, 7/31/13

One of my favorite Idle Comics-Reading Pastimes involves trying to figure out the original publication date of any given stretch of Archie newspaper comics reruns. The use of Beanie Babies as a cultural touchstone places this one pretty firmly in the mid 1990s. Along the way, the strip also reveals the shortcomings of the Archie Joke-Generating Laugh Unit 3000’s linear humor-logic. Presumably its legal module made sure that it used the generic “bean bags” instead of the registered trademark “Beanie Babies,” a formulation that I’m pretty sure no actual human ever uttered. This leads into a distasteful punchline about Jughead making sweet love to whatever soft, cushy surface is most capable of enabling his extreme laziness.

Hi and Lois, 7/31/13

The bedroom eyes Hi and Lois are making at each other here imply that this “dressing up” banter isn’t so much about “weren’t things better in the ’50s, when women’s autonomy was strictly limited” so much as it’s about “I’d sure find it sexually arousing if I came home to find you dressed sexily, for sex.” It’s a weird conversation to have right in front of the kids at the kitchen table, but it’s also weird to have the kitchen table three feet away from the front door of your house, so who am I to question how they do things in this family.

Herb and Jamaal, 7/31/13

Ha ha, but wouldn’t it be funny if the depictions of U.S. statesmen on our currency were sentient beings? “Oh, God, I’ve been smothered in there for an eternity! At last, I can breathe again! Wait … what … are you feeding me into some infernal machine? NO PLEASE I BEG OF YOU NOOMMMphhh”