there
May 23rd, 2012
Like an idiot.
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Jesus & Mo (the characters) are absurd, blinkered, and oddly very sweet. J&M (the cartoon) is brilliant: sharp, delicious, irresistible.
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Jesus and Mo make the world a better place, bless their little hearts.
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...a philosophical confrère.
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The brilliant, celebrated, freaking hilarious atheist comic strip ...
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...rays of sanity in a befuddled world.
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The liveliest depictions of Muhammad currently available...
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J & Mo is the funniest and most consistently thought-provoking cartoon strip on the Net. In a saner world, it would run in a major newspaper.
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Wittily captures much of the absurdity of religious apologetics.
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I love the scrappy mockery of Jesus and Mo. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to mock any person, any thing, any activity, and any belief -- and J&M stands up for this unflinchingly
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Jesus & Mo is my go to example of how to do tasteful, beautiful religious satire.
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Wonderful
Brilliant! What are you on, Author?
God may not be loony, but can’t say the same about his followers.
I thought Jesus might allude to the rumour that Allah was a moon god or is based on an Arabian moon deity.
The Moon yeh ….. fucking splitter
Well, in all fairness, it does move from one side to the other… sort of like the little blip in Pong
Irony 1 Silly, Gullible, Superstitious Humans 0
At least the Moon is something which is actually real, which can actually be studied and understood, which doesn’t do bizarrely random things like, create flawed beings, put tempation in their path and then condemn them for all eternity because they acted according to their nature, only to then demand that those beings should murder him in order to redeem themselves.
Oh, man, I looked up bizarre to make sure I spelled it right, only to misspell temptation.
@Hylander, god is punishing you for your lack of faith.
Yeah! What has the moon ever done for us?
With regard to nothing in particular, I can’t help thinking of Alexander Abian’s proposal to destroy the moon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Abian#Moonless_Earth_theory
@Mother Goose: Yeah! What has the moon ever done for us?
==
Together with the sun it gives us the neap and sping tides. So it’s not a complete bore 😉
Sit and stare at the moon?
Like faithful subservient baboon?
The problem with theocratic nations
Is ridiculous prophetic expectations
That leads to clerical sponsored ruin.
If that’s a shooting star in frame 4, I take that as a sign that god has spoken to me personally since no one else (so far) has noticed it. If it’s not, well never mind then.
@Mother Goose: Yeah! What has the moon ever done for us?
It has probably helped any number of children get conceived after a romanitic “moonlit” assignation. It also provided an achievable destination for the space program which produced many useful inventions, and inspired a generation of kids to become engineers and scientists.
Have you heard that Coca Cola has a plan to paint the moon with a red laser that will make it look like a coke bottle cap?
@Darwin Harmless
Actually it was Stalin who wanted to paint the moon red, but the idea was scrapped because the yanks could then paint “Coca-Cola” over it…
@Mother Goose. Hey, Moonlight Sonota
Jerry W
As no one has mentioned the park bench, the trees, the landscape, Jesus or Mo,the other stars or the moon and the Jesus and Mo Website?.Then by your reckoning god must hae spoken to me too??
Surprised Mo hasn’t pondered how they put the moon back together?
Jerry, it’s not a shooting star, it’s one of Gods’ angels burning to death because a child told a lie.
GreatFuzzy, don’t forget lunatics, werewolves, and the Full Moon club.
Frankie Boyle on the London Olympics; “24 Billion pounds to stage the Olympics? For 24 billion we could write ‘Fuck off Germany’ on the moon”.
Better a moon just sitting there than a “Bad Moon Rising”.
@Hylander: Of course in a similar league of doing bizarre and unpredictable things are also evolution and human nature, like, for developing sentience and cognitive thinking and a conscience and compassion only to see them used to create huge illogical and easily disprovable models of reality that serve mainly to make themselves and each other unhappy, cause murder and mayhem, and keep them from satisfying their natural impulses. ^_^
(Next to romantic evenings – and creepy, scary nights with howling wolves, or sleepless ones with caterauling cats, and the whole female cycle thing – the moon is also responsible for the tides, and a huge influence on the climate and tectonics all over the planet… basically nothing here, most likely including the development of life itself, would be remotely the same without the moon…)
@AoS: Best fucking explanation for shooting stars ever! Brilliant, mate!
It’s not a god, it’s a timepiece – as Mo should know. Being full, we’re halfway through whatever month it is.
Well, the one thing it doesn’t do is `just sits there’…
Every day the moon moves across the heavens, always, steadily from West to East. Think about it.
Nassar Ben Houdja –
Now you’ve got the rhyme scheme for a limerick right, do try to get a grip on the rhythmic structure. The 1st, 4th and 5th lines must have between 8 and 11 syllables, the 3rd and 4th must have between 5 and 7 (like your first line in this weeks verse!). Getting this right is hard work for a non-native writer, but it is well worth the effort – the rhythm is what gives it its unique character.
A poet called Nassa Ben Houdja
Wrote verses which weekly got kluge-ier
Which caused irate ferment
In J&M’s ‘Comment’
Who all said “Just make it scan, would ya?”
Thanks FreeFox, the idea’s always amused me too. I wish I could take writers’ credit for it but alas! ’tis just one of the many less scientific – to put it mildy – explanations of celestial phenomena I’ve heard over the years. I was also told – by a vicar who visited my junior school once a week in an attempt to counteract all the facts we’d learned – that comet tails were the chained souls of sinners, rejected by God at the pearly gates, being dragged to Hell by Lucifer himself. I did ask how he managed to attach chains to ethereal souls. Apparently they were magic chains, an explanation so outlandish that I went away and read up on comets. It turned out that the souls were nothing more than dust and gas ejected from Lucifer, and the magic chains were gravity. At that age, I couldn’t work out why the vicar didn’t look too happy when I corrected his knowledge the following week; I mean, I have always been glad to learn something new, even to be corrected on things that I once thought were true, yet the vicar told my teacher that I was a disrespectful little boy, and I got punished for my bad behaviour, a cycle that continued right through my schooldays.
Grandmere Mimi, welcome to our beloved Author’s hallowed pages, glad you could join us. Now there’s nothing wrong with ‘Bad Moon Rising’. It’s my second favourite thing about the film ‘An American Werewolf in London’. I’ll leave my absolute favourite to the imagination.
Author, thanks for this one. The moon has been a lifelong fascination for me, even more so now I have at long last got a half-decent telescope. No photograph can compare with the experience of looking deep into the craters oneself. I would dearly love to be able to go back a few billion years, to when the moon was very much closer to the Earth (its’ ‘magic chain’ being more elastic than the ones used by Lucifer, it’s moving away from us by around 1cm every year) and every tide made mega-tsunami look like ripples on a pond in comparison.
One minor pedantic gripe, though not enough of one to issue a POTWA (I bet you all thought they’d gone away). With the full moon at that angle to the boys, their heads and shoulders, and the bench and trees and hill etc., should cast a long shadow towards us, and we should also be seeing the boys and the bench in silhouette. Unless the sun really shines out of Jesus’ arse that is 🙂
Hotrats, we’ve tried. God knows we’ve tried. But if you think you can succeed where we’ve failed, hats off to you and the best of luck. And as for the ‘non-native’ speaker, a look back at some of his phrases and terminology makes this man slightly suspicious; he does quite often sound like a native-speaker trying to sound like a non-native (although nowhere near as successfully as Achmed Harmless once did. ‘Sex the road like dogs’ indeed).
“I thought Jesus might allude to the rumour that Allah was a moon god or is based on an Arabian moon deity.”
Not a “rumor”; rather misinformation popularized by Christian fundamentalist “scholars” whose knowledge of Semitic languages and ancient near eastern religions is very poor at best.
Acolyte of Sagan, I blush to be remembered. And I glory in your stories of childhood. Great tales.
Darwin Harmless, one doesn’t forget a classic, and that post of yours -soory, Achmed’s – was certainly a classic.
My schooldays were a running battle between me and my R.E. teachers. It helped my cause that I was a very early reader with – as my Grandad once said – a fine bullshit detector, so right from the start they’d tell us a bible story one day, and the next I’d be back with tricky questions or unwanted, science-based explanations. My proudest moment came in my early teens, when I suggested that Mary could have got pregnant without it affecting her virginal status if Joseph had spilled his seed directly onto her genitalia, either by masturbating or premature ejaculation, and some wayward sperm had managed to negotiate a path inside. It earned me six strokes of the cane in front of the entire school and instant hero status among my peers, and I also had the pleasure of hearing my R.E. teacher tell the headmaster that he no longer wanted “THAT blasphemous little bastard” in his classroom. As further ‘punishment’, I was told that I was no longer allowed in that particular teacher’s R.E lessons, but was instead to spend the period in the school library!
I have actually been considering writing a book based on those early experiences; ‘Confessions of a Little Atheist’ anyone?
@AoS: Nazi pig attacks! I mean… that must be your favourite thing in AAWwIL. Or the zombie couple n the sex theatre. Or the clumsy assistant of the inspector. Or… no, it has to be one of those three. I’d be staggered to guess at what #3 could be, except “everything else”. Awesome film! ^_^
I would read the book. Maybe you blog it? Or selfpublish as ebook. If so, please let me know. I tried something similar, as you might have noticed if you followed the link in my handle, though I have been too busy with the present for the last year to add much to it. I’d still love to hear your comments on it. It seems like we share some experiences, if seperated by 1 1/2 generations, like school wars and living with Roma…
@Mimi: I visited your blog, and I want to thank you for your recovery story and for the public SSM support banner. It means a lot.
@AoS Love the school stories!
You should try to get hold of “The Tragedy of the Moon” by Isaac Asimov (non-fiction). It’s probably long out of print, but try Amazon for a used copy.
The more pressing question is: who built it?
http://tiny.cc/df1sew
AofS I’d read it too.
J Ascher & Meh, I don’t recall hearing that Diana the Huntress had undergone gender realignment, therefore the link with Allah is a red herring.
FreeFox, #3 would have to be seeing Jack transform into the werewolf for the first time. It was only time-lapse photography and looks clumsy compared to today’s CGI, but at the time it was groundbreaking. At the risk of sounding shallow, #1 was Jenny Agutter. And you’re right of course, it is an awesome film. If you haven’t already seen the follow-up ‘An American Werewolf in Paris’……..DON’T! It’s around 80 minutes of your life you’ll never get back.
Thanks to all for the kind words re. my memories of my schooldays. I certainly intend to record them in some format, but I’ll be debating with myself whether a self-confessed e-bookophobe would be a hypocrite for publishing one.
HaggisFor Brains, thanks for the recommendation, I’ll be looking out for a copy. His ‘Foundation’ series was excellent, and I say that as one who doesn’t really read or watch much sci-fi: lots of sci-, but very little -fi, I have the full set of ‘Foundation’ in a bookcase alongside all five of Douglas Adams’ ‘Hitchikers’ trilogy.
Daoloth, that book wouldn’t be detailing the idea that the moon was hollowed out, motorised and navigated into Earth orbit by aliens, and that we are the product of their science experiment, would it? Sort of ‘Scientology meets the Clangers’. Speaking of which, does anybody else think that the Soup Dragon may have been a parent of the FSM?
And finally, to all who responded to “What has the moon ever done for us”, I think Mother Goose may have been asking a rhetorical question.
@Hylander
If the moon has helped so many children to be conceived, perhaps we should find some way to turn it off?
The moon is actually quite important, it acts as a stabiliser for the earth, life on earth might not even be possible without it.
From Astrobiology magazine. http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/4134/the-odds-for-life-on-a-moonless-earth-
@AoS: Well, Ms. Agutter isn’t really my type. Chromosomally. I kinda had the hots for Griffin “Jack” Dunne (who, btw is the one who gets killed and returns as a Zombie, David “David” Naughton is the one who changes into a hairy beast), though, ahem, the more the, er, riper he got… yeah, yeah, I know… I’m sick… *shrugs* we vulpines love ourselves some carrion, I’m afraid. ^_^’
And one look at the trailer for American Werewolf in Paris was enough, thank you very much, no danger for me there… *shudders* Some stuff is even too dead for my taste…
I must say I am kinda pleased how many cool factual and fictional information and further links about the moon we got together on such short notice. I seriously learned something in this weeks comments. Cool. ^_^
I stand corrected FreeFox, but it has been some time since I last watched it. I must say that it’s only pheasant that I like ripe and well-hung, but hey, whatever floats your boat. Come the apocolypse, when the dead rise from their graves to await judgement, I can guess who’ll be running around as happy as a fox with his own key to the henhouse 🙂
Something for the barmaid.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/files/2012/05/PapstBier-500×375.jpg
FreeFox, I’ve just seen your last comment on the asboJ ‘MBE’ thread.
I’m sincerely touched, my friend. Thank you.
Most folks seem to have missed the point of this subtle dialogue, which is quite poignantly illustrated in cel three. Go back and scarf an eyeload of the naked moon. If you have no sense of wonder, if you do not recognize that J & M are factually wrong on all three observations, then you have failed to get the point. Kudos to the authors of this brilliantly conceived artistic commentary. Well done.
This is weeks out of sequence because I’ve been trying since April 25 to decode the pun in Ale-Ahu Akbar. It pains me to admit it because I pride myself on having a razer-sharp intellect, etc., etc. Will someone please put me out my misery? Erhh, no guns or garrottings, just tell me the joke. And remind me what POTWA is an acronym for? I’ll write it down this time. Thanks.
@Mahatma Coat;
Perhaps your intellect is just a little too razor-sharp – Ale is just a kind of light traditional beer, adding ‘ahu’ to make a terrible pun on Allahu Akbar (god is great). Ale is pronounced ‘ayell’, so it’s only a visual pun, you can’t speak it.
I think the point is not the pun itself but the brilliant ‘God, it’s Great’ slogan below.
I also don’t know what a POTWA is, from the context something like a fatwa? Google gives POTWAOG for ‘putting on the whole armour of god’ and POTW for ‘pussy of the week’. Perhaps AoS will be good enough to decrypt it for us.
Found it – ‘Put on the whole armour’ – Epistle to the Ephesians 6:11.
Kudos to AoS for such an obscure reference.
Hotrats, a fine piece of detective work on my POTWA reference, but I’m afraid you were on a wild goose chase. Some of us pedants here decided to form a language watchdog group ‘UPOTWA’ (United Pedants of the World Association). You were right that a POTWA is similar to a fatwa, but is to be issued sparingly and only for the most serious of crimes against language and against established fact. Author escaped a POTWA because a) the shadows issue was a mere oversight that I pointed out because I am a pedant; b) because it’s a cartoon and artistic accuracy is not neccessary to get the joke across, and c) because he’s our beloved Author and therefore infallible.
A look through the comments from the last few months’ cartoons should clarify.
The pedant in me wouldn’t even allow me to accept your kudos, simply because I didn’t deserve it. Had I instead wallowed in that well-meant praise, I would have left myself open to a POTWA from my fellow UPOTWA members.
Thanks AoS, my usual firm grip on the wrong end of the stick.
Please enrol me in UPOTWA forthwith – I’ve already been acting like a member for years, and the ability to issue POTWAs is a real step forward.
I am reminded of an exchange on a news comedy show (apropos of the Chilean miners’ rescue):
“You can’t really call it a miracle, because it was just done with peoples’ hard work.”
“Ah, a representative from The Pedants’ Society…”
“…Actually, it’s The Pedants’ _Association_ …”
Hotrats, on behalf of my fellow members, welcome aboard.
The absolute best part of the whole Chilean mine rescue, aside from the fact that they were indeed rescued, was the miner who was asked what he was going to do next. His response was basically ‘I’m going to bang my wife so hard, the next time you see her she’ll be in a wheelchair’! Now that’s love, romance and passion in a nutshell.
“What is the moon compared to the almighty creator of the entire universe?”, asks Mo in frame two.
Well Mo, I’ve just spent an hour or so in the garden with my telescope, looking at the moon until the rising horizon hid it from view, and now feel qualified to enlighten you. Compared to the almighty creator, the moon is…..there! So, great prophet’s body double, as I told the holy vulture who came sniffing round whist my mother was in the final stages of dying from cancer (Religion; exploitation of the weak and desperate a speciality; your misery is our gain), show me your god or shut the fuck up.*
*In case you were wondering, he did indeed shut the fuck up.
@AoS: Oh man, I really have to think about your last comment on ASBOJ. Fuck. x_x’
Thanks hotrats. On UPOTWA, a friend of mine was once accused of pedantism. She replied,”It’s not pedantism, it’s pedantry.” Opportunities like that come once in a lifetime.
FreeFox, would I be right in thinking that at long last we are beginning to understand each other? That our disagreements have been largely over terminology, rather than the ideas themselves? Even if not, I hope that our debate may have caused some others to really think about what they believe and why, happening as it did on a site run – and mainly visited by – disillusioned or dissatisfied Christians.
I still can’t believe they let you get away with calling god a cunt though. 🙂
I take no pleasure in this, but even as a newbie member of UPOTWA I am honour bound to issue a POTWA against A@S for the following earlier post:
#
Very nice! However: Shouldn’t
“Blood drinking and a bit of ritualized cannibalism” be
“A bit of ritualized blood drinking and cannibalism”?
#
Acolyte of Sagan says: May 14, 2012 at 5:35 pm
Victor, a good point. However, it really should be ‘ritualised’.
No no no, it can be ‘-ised’, but you mustn’t say it ‘should be’.
Most nouns can have either, with -ize preferred in the US and -ise in the UK.
‘-ize’ is compulsory (US and UK) when used with stems ending in -ism, -ization, and -y (respective exempli gratii – canalize/ise, criticize, civilize and agonize).
Compulsory -ise is reserved to stems containing cis-, mis- and vis- (Latin cut, put, see, as in incise, surmise and revise) and words derived from French verbs (advertise, surprise etc.).
While the ‘descriptive’ Chambers dictionary allows both (reflecting that both are in use), the more ‘prescriptive’ Oxford Concise only recognises ‘ritualize’ (in the vain hope of maintaining a consistent rule).
Sorry, but there it is.
OUCH!
@hotrats: I’m not sure I understand your linguistic nitpick. As far as I can figure out (from the free online dictionary, websters online, and google translate), both ritualise and ritualize are grammatically correct. And since Jesus and Mo usually use British conventions in their speech bubbles, isn’t AoS’s statement – that it “should” (but doesn’t have to be) ritualised-with-an-s – exactly right then?
Or, to make my question clearer, which of the to me rather confusing rules you quoted are the basis of the Oxford’s claim that only ritualize is possible?
Or are you just using a dusty old book written by a collective of mostly by now unknown otherworldly old geezers as your sole basis for a prescripte argument to regulate other people’s behaviour, and demand following it out of pure faith in the word? ^_^
Cheers Freefox, I really couldn’t be arsed. I mean, how rude to ask for membership, and the power to issue POTWAs, then instantly turn it on the one kind enough to grant that power, especially when, as you succinctly pointed out, in his haste to issue his first POTWA he did so on a false premise. Methinks he forgot one of the golden rules; Just because you can, it doesn’t mean you have to.
However, taking my cue from a couple of the sci-fi franchises (‘Star Wars’ and ‘Gremlins’ I think, but don’t quote me, it may be ‘Star Trek’ or ‘Battlestar Whatshisname’ or ‘Critterz’ ((see what I did there?)) for all I know, they’re all much of a muchness to me) ‘Hotrags, with power comes responsibility. The force in you is great, but you are young and will learn to use the force wisely’.
The moon IS the miracle.
@AoS: *cringes and blushes a deep scarlet on your behalf about that “quote”* >.<###
@Hotrods: Seriously though: Is it ritualism, ritualization or ritualy that prevents ritualised? And what is the problem with canalization that allows one to canalise? *confused* ^_^'
(To clarify, as a native German speaker, to whom language is a bit like LEGO building blocks, something you can dis- and reassemble in most shapes and forms if it serves the solution to a communications problem, I have no serious problem with canalism – which might e.g. be the ideology of keeping cities clean through underground liquid waste disposal, or the conviction that in the distant past an ancient and dying civilisation (sic!) tried to prevent the slow desertification of the red planet through artificial irrigation on a breathtakingly massive scale – and thus should reject "to canalise" stringently, yes?)
Eh? Now what have I said? Was it the ‘arsed’ or the sci-fi that I should be mortified about?
“Non, je ne regret rien”, as the little sparrow sang.
Hotrats, a question, if I may? I’ve just noticed that the post of mine that you chose as the subject of your first POTWA declaration was taken from the last-but-one comic to this, and I’m intrigued to know; did you spot my ‘error’ a fortnight ago, and have been brooding on how to bring it to my attention since?. Or was it the other way round? You learnt of, and was granted membership to UPOTWA and immediately became drunk on power, so started working back through the comments to find your first victim?
Another thing I spotted on re-reading your post – and how I missed it initially is beyond me, possibly my sub-conscious protecting my sensibilities – is that in the very first line you used the abominable term ‘newbie’, a non-word so worthy of contempt that anything written subsequent to it loses any meaning; a diabolical collection of letters so shit-grippingly awful that its use alone is grounds enough for a Super-POTWA. If you’ve no idea what a Super-POTWA is, well that’s because I’ve just made it up, but believe me it’s bad. Imagine being trapped in a room for eternity with only Jeremy Kyle and Noel Edmonds for company, Phil Collins ‘songs’ playing on a loop in the background, and back-to-back Jennifer Aniston rom-coms on a giant screen. Well it’s worse than that!
Oh, just one more thing (he says, in his best Columbo’ voice), in my post above @11:47am yesterday, I see I refer to you as ‘Hotrags’! This I assure you was a genuine typo.
🙂
@FF:
This place is a pedant’s paradise – to begin with, a single word has no ‘grammar’, only orthography. The nit pick is ‘should be’. In orthography, this category does not exist. A word either ‘can’ be spelled more than one way, or ‘must’ be spelt a particular way. For example, spelled/spelt in the previous sentence is a ‘can’, as is ritualise/ize because it can be derived directly from ‘ritual’ rather than ritualism, ritualization (the likely cause of the Oxford insistence) or ritualy. This is why I took issue with AoS saying it ‘should be’ one rather than another.
To freely admit an error, it is only in the US that ‘ize’ is mandatory for ‘-ism’ etc., in the UK both are accepted. Words in the second category I listed are ‘musts’ – advize and disguize are always wrong.
There is no problem with canalization vs. canalise because in the UK it is usually spelled ‘canalisation’. Your coinage of ‘canalism’ (too easy!) does not make the rule applicable in the UK, and in the US it is always ‘canalize’ anyway.
(To put this into context for all non-native speakers, the problem arose because in the 18th century an American lexicographer called Noah Webster thought that American English should have a well-defined character of its own, and to this aim simplified many UK spellings (flavour/flavor, centre/center, cheque/check etc.) and settled on ‘ize’ rather than ‘ise’, to avoid pronunciation confusion with words like ‘vise’. His dictionary was hugely popular, his spelling book was the most popular school textbook ever published, and this set the standard for US English. Ever since, separate editions of popular works have to be produced, at pointless expense, to satisfy the spelling prescriptivists on both sides of the Atlantic).
As you point out, in the UK, ‘ise’ is usual, but the comment section is international and taking commenters to task for not following UK conventions is ethnocentrism, not pedantry, hence the POTWA. I quite agree that prescriptive English dictionaries have proved a failure, as I hoped to suggest with ‘in the vain hope’ etc. and I was actually charging AoS with attempted prescriptivism.
(As an Englishman living in Germany, I also have to acknowledge that strict prescriptivism in written German has been a resounding success, producing a language that is enviably phonetic and spelling-consistent).
@AoS –
I do take your point about not getting carried away in the first fires of my membership, and please note that I was careful to acknowledge my beginner status, and disown any pleasure in your being my first victim – it could have been anybody. My gratitude does not impinge on my pedantic instincts, and I fail to see how any pedantry can be rude, or ungrateful, even if grounded on a false premise – any attempt at establishing precision is impersonal by definition.
However like a good UPOTWAn I am always ready to stand corrected – if you can’t take it, you shouldn’t dish it out – and looking back through the archive it seems that the threat of a POTWA is more than enough, and I retroactively so amend the accusation. POTWA lifted, but you still have to make a case for ‘should be’. According to whom? Author, no less, used ‘ritualize’ in the strip in question, so perhaps your issue is with him?
@AoS re newbie –
Guilty as charged, OMG sorry sorry sorry. No edit facility, so it stands as a permanent stain on my character.
To answer your question, I had spotted it first time around, before finding that pedantry here was at such a premium.
Hangs head in shame…especially when I could have used ‘neophyte’ – ah, feels better already…
Hotrats, now you’re getting into the spirit of it. Welcome! (But….OMG? What the …. 🙂 )
To your question “POTWA lifted, but you still have to make a case for ‘should be’. According to whom?”
Well…..me! Old hands here know that I have a real problem with Americanisms crossing the Atlantic. Being old enough to have had teachers rapping my knuckles with the edge of a ruler for spelling errors, it pains me to see arbitrary ‘z’s (zeds, not zees) being cast around with gay abandon, not to mention the missing ‘u’s from ‘colour’ and ‘flavour’, etc. So I will discreetly ‘correct’ offenders for these crimes without considering them worthy of a POTWA.
But they’re not the most serious of the trans-Atlantic abuses, not by a long chalk. Since when was ‘aluminium’ (al-you-mini-um) pronounced ‘aloo-min-um’? However, the ultimate linguistic insult harms not only the English language, but science and scientists to boot, so would any Americans reading this please take note and pass the following around your fellows: ‘Laboratory’ is, always has, and always will be pronounced ‘la-borra-tor-ree’, even occasionally ‘la-borra-tree’, but NOT EVER should it be pronounced ‘labba-tor-ree’.
One often sees articles bemoaning the dearth of students in the U.S.A. opting to study the hard sciences at college and university level; maybe if they stopped rhyming laboratory with lavatory it might prevent the subliminal connection between science and toilets.
Just don’t get me started on the de-valuing of a billion!
Now look what you’ve done, setting me off on a rant like that. I’m off for a lie-down in a darkened, quiet room.
@ AoS:
Well said, and I would add their child-like inability to pronounce parity, atom, aunt, metal, winter, human, herb, caught, route, hostile, squirrel and nuclear – which emerge as parody, Adam, ant, meddle, winner, yoomen, erb, cot, rout, hostel, squirl and nookerler.
Welcome, hotrats, to our merry band! (note careful use of commas). I was particularly interested in the explanation of Webster’s dictionary being largely to blame for Americanisms. One of my own pet hates is DEE-fence and OFF-ence, which I suspect arise largely from American football (handball?) commentators trying to exaggerate the difference. If they had just used “attack”, there would have been no need for the exaggerated first syllable.
Enjoy the fun, and don’t get too serious!
Just one other little peeve; sem-eye final. Oh, and zeebra. And London-England / Paris-France / Rome-Italy, all of which are in Yurp. And merkin is a pubic wig, not a way to pronounce American. And the compensation culture. And trash T.V.
Sorry, did I say just one?
Funnily enough, I’ve never yet met an American I didn’t like; if only they spoke proper like wot we do!
A Clasic one, wonderful.
@poor Richard, thank-you
read about the triumph of the moon here
My goodness, a POTWA potluck!
Any other Monty Python fans wonder if Mother Goose ( comment #10 ) was just giving the response to vadi evi (#4) ‘s call?
Regardless, I think this is one of the top 10 threads here. Not quite up to the level of “Wha…ka…ka…ka” , but a great sketch of the clientele of this locale.