Language Log

In 1880, not long after the invention of the telephone, Mark Twain noted how weird a conversation is when you erase one of the participants ("That queerest of all queer things in the world", 3/25/2004):

I handed the telephone to the applicant, and sat down. Then followed that queerest of all the queer things in this world—a conversation with only one end to it. You hear questions asked; you don’t hear the answer. You hear invitations given; you hear no thanks in return. You have listening pauses of dead silence, followed by apparently irrelevant and unjustifiable exclamations of glad surprise or sorrow or dismay. You can’t make head or tail of the talk, because you never hear anything that the person at the other end of the wire says.

Now Dan Walsh, an "an Irish musician, artist, nerd and businessman" who blogs under the name of Travors, has applied this technique to a comic strip: Garfield minus Garfield.

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.

Yes, it's a three-comic morning.

From stereotypist (4/23/2008).

It's a class-conscious respelling that's not used "to indicate that the speaker is uneducated or using colloquial, dialectal, or nonstandard speech".

(Click on the image for a larger version, as usual.)

Explain. Extra credit: compare to Hannibal Lecter's famous line "A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti."

This morning's Get Fuzzy:

One form of American Exceptionalism — resistance to texting — is definitely gone:

From The Unspeakable Vault (of Doom), a warning about using spellcheckers when summoning Elder Gods…