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In order to put today’s Rex Morgan, M.D., into its full delightful context, we need to backtrack to yesterday’s strip. Heather, the Morgans’ long-ago former nanny who they decided to fire because they wanted to raise their daughter themselves but then she quit before they could fire her so she could start a day school where they’d send Sarah anyway, has now decided to sell that day school so she can monitor her lunatic husband full-time instead:

Panel from Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/13/13

Aw, Happy Otter Schools! That sounds nice!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/14/13

…nice for other children, that is. Lesser children. Sarah is different and shouldn’t have her mind contaminated by some garbage Canadian McPrivateschool chain. Only the very best and most elite schools are good enough for Sarah. Sarah’s non-Morgan classmates, who have also been Heather’s beloved pupils, will not be hearing anything about this “really good” school. The name is probably in some language that poor people don’t even speak!

Hagar the Horrible, 9/14/13

Oh, look, it’s apparently complaining about double negatives week in the comics! I’ll say this for Hagar: it’s at least true that negative concord was not a feature of Old Norse. (In fact, that may be why it’s absent from Northern English dialects!) So, props for historically accurate linguistic peevery, I suppose.

In other news, Hagar the Horrible is doing the “Hagar tries and fails to cheat on his wife” thing it does every few years or so.

Mark Trail, 9/14/13

Now we know why Senator Mason is so eager to drill for oil in Lost Forest: his daughter’s boyfriend desperately needs petroleum byproducts to maintain his magnificent pompadour. Our nation’s current strategic reserves simply aren’t adequate for the task.

Blondie, 9/14/13

Welcome to today’s Blondie, where the punchline only offers that element of surprise necessary for humor to those readers who are so senile that they have no idea what month it is. Do these guys know their audience or what?

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Guys, I was looking at the numbers from my CafePress store, and it turns out that these Open Feedback Sharing items haven’t sold a million units yet, which doesn’t really make sense. So go click the clickies and buy what looks delightful to you! (Hint: It all looks delightful.)

And now that you’ve gone and done that, enjoy … your comment of the week!

“This is my daughter, Anne Marie. The ‘Marie’ stands for ‘marionette.’ Because she’s a life sized puppet, see? Look upon her grim visage and her badly permed 80s hair, ye mortals, and tremble.” –bunivasal

And your runners up! Very funny!

Mary Worth: “Being healthy is being able to adapt. For example, I plan to grow a reflective exoskeleton to help me survive the radiation barrage as our sun goes supernova. Skol!” –La Cieca

“I don’t know about Sam, but Barfy’s name should be a dead giveaway why he’s not allowed in church.” –greghousesgf

“Someone should tell little PJ that pride is a deadly sin.” –Chip

“Yes, Spider-Man. The guy I’m pointing at in case anyone confuses two grown men dressed in spider-themed body suits. No, not you Scorpion … that guy … on Mosquitoman’s right … my right, your left…” –Kevin on Earth

“Mark Trail can change the size of his hand to ring any doorbell, no matter how tiny.” –Ned Ryerson

“Bull, five seconds later: ‘A flask! THANK FUCKING GOD.'” –Windier E. Megatons

“In his skin! Or, at least, in someone’s skin. Guido’s a skin-changer, Dad, but I didn’t want to tell you, because I know you hate Italians and eldritch horrors. You’re such a racist, Dad! In his thousand hearts, Guido may be a multifarious mass of gibbering mouths — some of them Italian — but in my heart, he’s the demon for me.” –Voshkod

“Oh, I thought Bull looked through the lost and found because he was laid off six months ago and needs stuff to fence on the street to keep from starving. So ‘keys to victory’? I’ll let him know you made that wisecrack.” –Alex Blaze

“What happened to Mr. McKenzie? Did he die? Or did he leave you for a younger woman? That happened to a lady down the street. She had a bunch of cats. They ate part of her face when she died. Is that why you don’t have any cats?” –Christopher

“I’m not fooled — that little kid clearly came up with that pun in advance, and led into it deliberately. By William’s Rules Of Punsterism, this means the resulting pun is null and void, and the old lady gets to make two at him in turn. So … it’ll be a long week, is what I’m getting at.” –The Ben

“My sabermetrics analysis on the Mudlarks teams always begins with the same note each year: ‘Don’t assemble athletes around bonfire at start of season inhaling smoke fumes.’ Glad to see that now the cheerleading squad is also enjoying the performance non-enhancement of smoke from old couches and other garbage.” –Chareth Cutestory

“Love the sympathetic look on the dog’s face. He knows. Dolly reads to him, too.” –Myrtle

“Mark, the surveyor’s results were very positive: we think that, with the right fracking chemicals, we can recover thousands of barrels per day from Rusty. I know you outdoor people can be sentimental, but fully exploiting him could create hundreds of good paying jobs that our state needs and help America become energy-independent.” –Master Softheart

“Did I miss the plotline in Gil Thorp where the population of Milford was replaced with aliens desperately trying to disguise themselves as human but just never quite managing to get it right? Or was that just the premise of the strip from day one?” –Dragon of Life

“It’s clear in the first panel of the Gil Thorp strip that the young girl is wearing a mask (see that line going down the side of her ‘face’?) Thusly, it can be safely assumed this is the nefarious she-demon that requires the annual sacrifice to ensure the football team is … okay … at best?” –Justin T.

“So a patron gives Herb a friendly, colloquial compliment on the quality of the food, and Herb’s reaction is to say, ‘Uh … OK’ before backing away slowly and panicking in the back room while peeking nervously over his shoulder at the man. This makes Heart & Soul the opposite of the Olive Garden. When you’re here, you’re treated like an untrustworthy and possibly dangerous stranger.” –Joe Blevins

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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.