Wizard of Id by Parker and Hart for December 20, 2013

Come on King save him,you little runt.

You spoke too soon, Rodney. Watch what you say.

Good thing Rod didn’t say he had “a splitting headache.”

His head is in a vise, with an ‘s’. A vice, with a ‘c’, is Something Completely Different — and usually lots more fun.

Glad to see vice spelt in the proper UK fashion.

But I’m sure he was using ‘literally’ figuratively.

Anyone who believes we speak “English” here in the USA has never been to G B. We speak American.

Language evolves.

Made an honest man out of him

Vise?

a word means what I want it to meanbut it helps if we agree on that definition

I love the idea here, because misuse of the word “literally” is one of my pet peeves. We need that word, because sometimes it helps to clarify, when what you’ve said could be taken as a figure of speech, but you don’t mean it that way. Too bad about the misspelled “vise”, though – which is kind of ironic, since the intention of the strip seems to be to throw a bone to people who care about good and correct writing and speaking.

“What is we now have in America is not even close to the American language.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Living languages change over time, whether we like it or not.Dead languages don’t change because.they are not spoken commonly. Some of the changes in our language I abhor. Use to be that ‘lay’ and ‘lie’ had their specific differences, but now everyone says ‘lay’ when then should be saying ‘lie.’ The thing that complicates it is that ‘lay’ is the past tense of ‘lie.’There was a time when ‘lend’ was the verb and ‘loan’ was the lnoun. Now everyone uses loan as a verb. Even the dictionary reluctantly defines it as an alternative. That’s why our American language IS the American language, with a splattering of French, Spanish, English and a whole bunch of other languages. We SAY we speak English, but in actually, we speakAmerican.

Well, all this verbiage about a simple little word!!! My comment about the English language—— English is the hardest in the world to master. I’m trying, but I think I’m going to run out of years to do it!

this is America. it’s ‘vise’….

has no one heard of hyperbole?

Looks like the Wiz. would be a fan of Captain Literally.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jh4Mpgbi4A

I had to check with my fave dictionary, formerly known as the Amer. Herit. Dict. of the Eng. Lang. 4th Ed. It gives ‘vice’ as a variant of ‘vise’ with no geographic specification, which they normally would do. This is a dictionary that was originally written as a protest against other dictionaries that were too quick to grant legitimacy to misusages.

Vise.

If you want to get real technical, that is neither a vise or a vice on Rodney’s head — it is a parallel clamp.

Yes, edclectic, language evolves. Now that “literally” means “figuratively” and “only” means “one of a few”, nothing means anything.