Nancy by Olivia Jaimes for October 17, 2018

Why am I both impressed and annoyed that the millennialist mujer behind this has finally addressed such an important (if neglected by everyone but academics) issue?

Seriously, it’s a thing. Academics are the only ones who normally make such a fuss over this. There was one senior prof at my univ who was such an obsessive grammarian that she verbally abused a whole class of post-grads for not knowing “proper” grammar, breaking six to eight rules of university conduct in the process. She either didn’t know or forgot that in a lot of primary and secondary schools in India, both low-end and high-end, grammar education faded out in the early 2000s.

I tried to remind her of this, and she turned and bit my head off. It nearly came to blows.

I filed a petition to get her suspended, and took the whole story over to the univ’s vice-chancellor, complete with my taping of her rant. (I tape and podcast univ lectures for students who can’t make it to class.) I was surprised both of us got off scot-free.

The irony is, her thesis advisor is now mine, and the first thing we bonded over was her obsession.

I don’t get it.

Nancy is right. Language is always evolving. Just try to make sense of the original Ye Olde Shakespeare. Also, what is “proper” is context based. One would use different language on the street than in front of royalty.

When you meet a grammarian, you should ask them, “what song did the sirens sing to Odysseus?” That’s what the Emperor Tiberius did. It worked out for him.

Oh, ha ha, I get “it.”

I find myself drawn to the contrast of the character drawings in the last two panels. Sluggo, has his eyes directed forward and his head more forward relative to his shoulders, with the suggestion that he has a neck under that shirt. He looks much more “real”, as it were, than Nancy with her dead dot eyes, too-high mouth slit and head canted back from where it attaches to the body (no sign of a neck). It gives me the impression that panel 3 had more time taken on it and 4 was a rush job. Not a knock on the artist, but the contrast is striking.

Nancy is language!

I’M WITH YOU

This comic should be engraved into a gold plate and preserved. Mark Nancy’s words so future generations really can give their opinion.

I wonder if OJ is losing it, or going thru a phase of something.

8

Well done!

I think the comic today well highlights the inherent need for MODERATION in damn near everything and is quite brilliant.

In regard to language…. that moderation is vital. You need some rules, some rigidity to maintain coherence, yet you also need some flexibility to allow evolution of the language. Both concepts are valuable and important…. but at the same time are diametrically opposed to each other. That is where the difficulty comes into play.

The most useful point on this sliding scale where rigidity is at one end and evolution is at the other is where the big conundrum is to be found, and it does in fact shape the present and shapes our understanding of history as well.

…Nah, too easy. :)

OMG! NANCY BY OLIVIA JAIMES IS THE GREATEST COMIC STRIP OF ALL TIME!!!!!!!!!

No comment…..

Nancy oscillates between descriptive and prescriptive grammarian like a veritable sine wave of unacknowledged interior conflict. #nevermetastripIdidntlike

Sluggo is being snarky.

It doesn’t make sense to me that nothing got updated for me. This strip is from yesterday and yesterday, nothing got updated.