A comic by a curmudgeon

The curmudgeon isn’t me, either. A colleague from work texted me the link to this graphic. Looks like it’s from a Canadian who is acting decidedly un-Canadian, but he’s right on the money when it comes to content.

It looks like the link in the comic doesn’t work. Try angryflower.com for the site (big white labels are links to comics), and angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif for the comic.

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

The Oatmeal is a comic I follow, partly because the writer is a grammar curmudgeon, as I am. He also attracts a fair number of like-minded souls who also hate bad grammar, and who aren’t averse to adding the occasional comment. Even though The Oatmeal uses far more profanity than I, he’s correct on a lot of issues, and quite good at explaining grammar. Check out the site.

Recently (I think) he posted a comic called The worst thing about Valentine’s Day. Someone commented using incorrect grammar, and it spawned a series of comments that I thought were worth repeating. I haven’t gotten anyone’s permission to repeat their remarks, so if you are quoted here and don’t like it, let me know, and I’ll remove your portion.

Bobsagetjustcuz22: less long comments, more sexy rumpus

Kannma1717: Fewer long comments.

Paul Nelson Schofield: Less grammar police.

Toasty: *Fewer grammar police, Less grammar *policing.

Corey Danger: If there’s, one thing that, grammar police, hate it’s comma, splices. And sentence. Fragments.

Branrules101: I’m going to need back up for this serious offender.

Mrs. B.: If theres two thing’s that grammar police hate, even more its poor punctuation…. ellipse’s…. apostrophe’s used wrong and incorrect adverb usage.

ostyCollapse: not to mention runon sentences with no capitalization or punctuation or breaks of any kind they just go on and on and on talking about stuff that nobody cares about or can even read let alone discuss intelligently am i right

Can you find all the mistakes?    Happy valentine’s Day to you all.

The comic XKCD doesn’t often have a thread—more than one comic on the same theme (though it does have some recurring characters, such as a bad guy, who wears a black hat). Wouldn’t you know, one of those rare threads fits this blog, so I pretty much have to post this one, too. Be sure to go to the site and get the RSS feed. Even when it’s not about language, it’s a pretty good site. This comic is number 1012, by the way.

I guess the etymologist-entomologist joke is an old one.

“Entomon” means, literally, “in sections.” We have a descendant of this word in “tome,” meaning a large book. Originally it meant one of a set of books, such as part of an encyclopedia.

I was going to skip posting today, but I saw today’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and had to share it with all you grammar-lovers out there in case you missed it. (The link is for the SMBC main site. You have to navigate to the one for Dec 31, 2011 if you click the link some other day.) The strip is too long to show here, so here are the first two panels.

If it's not Dec 31, and you click the picture, I think it'll take you to the right day.

Of course this is one of my favorite mistakes to hate. Note that the bad guy did learn the grammar lesson—he just hates it.

I seem to be on a comics jag lately. As it happens, comic writers generally have a pretty good grasp of English, and they have well-developed senses of humor, so I suppose comics are naturally a fertile field for humorous references to our language.  Here are two more.

Bob Thaves, he of Frank and Ernest, is the consummate master of the egregiously wonderful pun. (Yes, “egregiously wonderful” is an oxymoron, at least when applied to puns. The better the pun, the bigger the groan.) You really should bookmark or get an RSS feed to this strip.

"ad hominem" is the punned-upon term, but you probably knew that

This one is from an absurdist strip I found recently, named Hubert and Abby. It happens to mention a word that if you get it wrong, you betray serious illiteracy. (And if you got that sentence on the first try, you are definitely not illiterate.)

Beware of words the spell checker doesn't catch!