Three Definitions

I never had the problem described in the first panel, but the definitions in the remaining panels are pretty good.

‘nuf said.

Actually, I usually see only one comparison in analogies and similes.

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Sundae, meaning a dish of ice cream with topping, is from the Sanskrit sandhi, meaning “a putting together.” It’s a grammatical term for the effect the ends of two words have on each other. This is one of the things that makes Sanskrit hard—The beginnings and ends of words constantly change depending on the words they are next to. Apparently the person (note I didn’t say “guy;” who am I to assume it was a male) who invented the sundae knew Sanskrit, and had a poetic bent, calling the dish a putting together of ice cream and topping.

We don’t exactly have sandhi in English, but sometimes the beginnings and ends of words can have an effect on each other. So be careful how you pronounce what you say. Hence the third panel of this edition of Basic Instructions:

Correctly pronounced, the two s’s (esses?) between the words “brussels sprouts” lasts a hundredth of a second or so longer than in “brussel sprouts” and you can hear it if you listen carefully.

That’s a little bit like sandhi, eh?

Scott Meyer’s Basic Instructions is usually funny, but this strip also has a touch of actual phonics. Or maybe I should say “phonetics.” The word of interest is in the second panel; it’s “schwa.”

The schwa looks like an upside-down lowercase e. That’s ə. You won’t find it in your ASCII chart, though. You have to use html or something else to make it, such as find it on a web page someplace, and do a copy and paste. The decimal html schwa is “&#601” and if you prefer hexadecimal, it’s “&#x0259” but enough of this technical stuff.

Just recognize that that upside-down e us pronounced “uh,” like the right-side up “e” in “the.”

I touched on the singular they in the past, and I recommend you follow the link if you don’t know what the singular they is. Today I ran into a usage of it that jumped out at me a little, so I thought I’d share.

First, look at the conversation in the third panel of Scott Meyer’s Basic Instructions:

Since we’re talking about spouses here, the issue of “his” or “hers” being the right word is a little stronger than it would be in a lot of other contexts. On one hand, in this context he’s talking about his wife. And on the other hand, he wants to make his statement tactfully general. And on the third hand, Scott is somewhat constrained for space, so “their” fits better than “his or her.”

Now look at panel three’s heading. Same problems. Scott doesn’t have much room, and he doesn’t know whether your spouse is male of female. So even though the topic is spouses, which is reasonably gender related, which would make “his or her” appropriate, he chose “their.”

Writing can get tricky sometimes, eh?

Scott Meyer is a pretty funny comic strip artist and writer. This recent comic made me twitch. See how many mistakes you can count. You should be able to find at least one in every panel. I counted more than a dozen. I don’t think he’s writing about me; I corrected him only once and that was years ago.