Ink Pen by Phil Dunlap for July 17, 2010

Oh, Hamhock … at least no one cut your head off and held it up in the window.

Well Hamhock you learned two things:

An adventure is best left to people like Tyr. Tyr is infatuated with Wonder Woman and her Lasso of Truth.

And she would love Tyr’s Axle of Semi-truth.

They are dressing Wonder Woman, not better but more. Take your last look at those legs guys, they’re gone. Oh, I don’t look at the pictures, I just read the story..

More to the point, you can’t handle Wonder Woman, although I’m sure you’d like to try.

WW’s had costume redesigns before, and I’m sure this won’t be the last.

Just so long as Ms. Amazement doesn’t follow suit (so to speak), it makes no difference to me anyway.

WW, in distant Khartoum Took Spider-man up to her room They argued all night Over who had the right To do what, with which ropes and to whom.

Nope, eldo. A flirtatious womAn. Minks am plural.

Vixen is singular.

X-mas is foolish.

Grammar rules. Go figure.

“X” as an abbreviation for “Christ” goes back almost to the earliest days of the church. Early Xian art and manuscripts used the symbol liberally (also “XP” and “Xt”), and those who’ve used the term “Xmas” in writings include Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (“Lewis Carroll”). Noted fools all, I suppose.

According to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, most of the evidence for these words (“Xianity”, “Xmas”) comes from “educated Englishmen who knew their Greek”.

What’s usually forgotten, though, is that “Xmas” is nonetheless properly pronounced “kris-mas”, and is only appropriate in informal writings (like internet forums), or other places (newspaper headlines and such) where concision is the norm.

I suspect there’s also a vestige of the time-honored tradition (still observed in some communities) against writing out holy names (like “G_D”) on mundane documents that might be thrown away or otherwise destroyed.