Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for January 28, 2013

Isn’t it already an impediment?

It can be – just ask Orwell.

Many politician do so and confuse it, so you can understand nothing any more!!

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” – Hunter S. Thompson.

Impact. Contact. Perfectly good nouns that have been verbed. sigh

O Hobbes thats been around for a long time already .

Google :)

Totally photoshopped.

Actually, language degenerates at least as much as it develops. The problem for most people seems to be telling which is which.

It always has been, Hobbes. I think it was Voltaire who said language helps us conceal out thoughts.

There are a few sports announcers who do this.

Disposition. As in how do we disposition product when it comes in for repair.

some time am confusing in englishhhhhhhhh…………..

I’d say this was a good read,but that would be way too obvious.

Eventually? It already was even long before this strip — for example, Americans could not (and many still cannot) understand “bin it” (which is very obvious in Britain).

If Ms Wormwood could overhear Calvin’s conversation she would promote him to head of the the class.

Ditto. Who wants to go back to noun cases and elaborate conjugations? If Anglo-Saxon hadn’t been used badly by the masses, we’d still be speaking it. Or Proto-IndoEuropean. Or whatever preceded it.

my bad!. lol totally rad strip wtfhowzat?

So I’m like, “yeah!”

@Elizabeth Justice:

Actually, according to Dictionary.com, the word “impact”, as both a noun and a verb, entered the English language in 1775-85 as a back-formation from “impacted” (with reference to teeth), which came into the language c. 1600 from the Latin impactus (with the meaning “press closely into something”).

According to the same source, “contact” did enter the language (in the 1620s) as a noun, but has been in use as a verb since 1834.

Now we can Google everything. As the language progresses, soon we will be able to Ebay things. Sometimes I like to Calvin my imagination.

Click here: Peanuts (December 26, 1977)Click here: Pearls Before Swine (October 15, 2003)Click here: Peanuts (September 2, 1969)

And, finally, here is one for Puddleglum:Click here: Non Sequitur (October 6, 2011)

I’ll have to google the origins of this … :-)

Almost there, Hobbes!

Seems like we’ve already got a good start, Hobbes.

Just when you thought it is the politicians’ mission to make language harder to understand.

I don’t remember when access wasn’t both a noun and a verb… and I don’t think Calvin does either – but Bill probably does. According to etymonline.com, the verb usage in computing dates to 1962

I hate it when people ask me if I went golfing.

And people wonder why contracts have to be so oddly phrased and state the obvious seven or eight times. If you leave some people the tiniest bit of ambiguity of language, they will use it.

Americans have been “canning” vegetables for over 60 years. And yet they use jars.

@orinoco womble: That’s really a jarring observation.

How fun!

We take verbs and use them as nouns quite regularly, as gerunds, so why not the opposite? Or don’t you like my nitpicking?

sigh What an odd conundrum that I have stumbled upon. Does Calvin mean that he can and will take any noun and transform it into a verb? Or does he mean that he can take virtually and word and make it a verb? Hmmmm……..

@orinoco womble,Can you can it, please? :o)

@Hobbes,And he goes, “Birds of a feather flock together.”If the grammar police throw him into jail, he’ll be another kind of bird.I had never heard of a bird being prepositioned, before.

@LX013 (from yesterday),It doesn’t mean that it’s sinful for a husband and wife to do what is necessary to conceive a child. It means that we inherit the sinful nature (originally from Adam through the fall). We inherit inclinations and tendencies to sin from previous generations.“The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.” Because the children take after their parents through these inherited traits, they sin in the same or similar ways as their parents and suffer the consequences of their sinful deeds, actions, and thoughts.Thank you for inquiring. I hope I have clarified it.

Gift me! I’m impacted!

Why we’ll never have a world language: .. Polish has no vowels.. Hawaiian has no consonents.. English has no sense.…And German sounds like an insult when you say hello.…A long time ago, I saw a sign at a Polish restaurant that said that Polish is easy…once you realize that “pstrang” is pronounced like “honk.”

So it was Calvin that made disrespect into a verb!

gifting is a favorite of mine. or should I say, I’ve favorited gifting for teeth gnashing.

At least he shows interest in grammar.

I wonder if Watterson, when he drew this rant, considered that what he was doing at that moment was “cartooning.” The language allows this crossover and is full of examples. The only “weirding” that happens is when a new occurrence enters the vocabulary and has an unfamiliar ring to it. It may sound jarring, especially to the purists, but there is no grammatical rule being violated!

In the beginning there was the word

@Night-Gaunt49,Everyone who has ever been born would have done what Adam and Eve did, so there would be no “innocent generations”, and forgiveness would still be necessary.

Hobbes was more prophetic than he knew way back in 1993 . . . language just about has been made “a complete impediment to understanding” (at least, for some of us anyhow!) — it’s called texting.

the government has been doing it for years on every document the print.

This ’toon gave me a good laugh – much needed these days…

A wise friend once told me: “Milk! It’s both a noun and a verb! You get what you do!”

……" it was so fun……" ?

disrespected!

I quoted this just the other day! I agree: Verbing weirds language.

For those of us old enough to remember when party, parent, and text were nouns.

‘but canning started under Napoleon Bonaparte. They were called “tins.”’

Yet when Appert invented canning he used bottles!http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Appert

Ah yes, almost my all-time favorite C&H cartoon. I howled when it first came out oh so many years ago.

If you imagine Colonel Klink saying it, yes…

why are there just reruns on Calvin and Hobbes? As much as I like it, it should have fresh comics, like Garfield.

Many HS kids think a language is an impediment to understanding, like English!

As I once saw on Facebook …

“I am not disturbed, or even perturbed, that you observed your love of ‘blurb’ as a verb.”

Classic.

Can if he has a bigger can to can it in!

what I find amazing about communication is the illusion that it actually happens!

@Night-Gaunt49,Humans don’t always react the same way, but they all sin (and I think they all would have done what Adam and Eve did since that was the only thing prohibited at the time), so all need forgiveness through Jesus Christ who is the only one who never sinned, but willingly suffered the penalty for our sins.Occam’s razor – “The simplest answer is often correct.”Simple people often try to correct what isn’t wrong to suit their own fancies.

Why talk at all if you don’t want to be understood?

Everybody misunderstood the political slogan, “CHANGE”. See what an impediment language can be.

Wow 80 comments

“Eventually, we will have restructured the language so that thought crime becomes impossible.” —George Orwell