If you Know the Rule, You’ll Get the Joke

I’ll spoil the comic if I tell you the rule first. Because you know the rule, but you didn’t think of it. So here’s the comic:

Did you notice that she put quotes around the title of the book? Remember sixth grade English?

• Book and magazine titles should be in italics.
• Chapter names and magazine article titles should be in quotes.

Basically, if it has its own cover, use italics. Anything else, put it in quotes.

Actually, I’m somewhat surprised that she used the correct punctuation.

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Perhaps the second-most common logical fallacy (after non sequitur) is “begging the question.” Well, maybe post hoc. Begging the question is when you use the thing you’re trying to prove as evidence for its truth. For example, someone asks whether you were speeding, and you reply, “Well, I didn’t get a ticket, did I?” Mostly people say “beg the question” because they heard the phrase in class when they weren’t paying attention, so that’s what they say when they mean “beg to ask a question.” They mean what the guy correctly says in the first panel:

When something stimulates you to ask a question, that’s okay; just don’t say you’re begging the question.

PS—a non sequitur is when two things happen together and you say that one thing is the cause of the other. And post hoc means “after this (therefore because of this.)” They are pretty similar.

Okay, they should make her look more glamorous, because she’s got good grammar technique! (Am I biased???) She’s suggesting they take out the plural to see how their sentence sounds.

The grammar rule is to use the objective case (me) after a preposition. We get this correct when the object is alone, but for some reason, people often don’t do this when they have a compound object.

Make her look more like my wife.

This is called the plural of majesty. Technically, only the king and queen may use this.

In German, royalty refer to each other with the formal “Sie,” and not the familiar “du.”

I’ve mentioned mondegreens before; do a search on the word in the upper right corner for more posts on the subject.

Here’s one I never thought of. (Maybe you have to be old enough to have heard this, by the way.) It’s in the last panel:

I never thought of this one because the context supplies a clue. The ad starts with the line, “Everybody doesn’t like something, but…” The parallelism caused by the “but” gives us a clue about how to interpret the ambiguous-sounding phrase in the second half of the motto. But maybe the first half could have been “everybody does it like something,” maybe? huh?

If you have a mondegreen you like, share it in the comments.

PS—”nobody doesn’t like” is a good double negative, by the way.