Frazz by Jef Mallett for May 20, 2024

Please Excuse Me Dear Aunt Sally.

Caulfield must have been reading about conditioned responses.

Could someone translate the last sentence about whiffing? I’m afraid my English vocabulary is not up to that. Many thanks.

Er . . . um . . . uh . . . what?!?

I’m mathematically declined.

Some would say without parenthesis, you work the problem left to right.

I could be wrong, but I thought I was taught in middle school/junior high, that all mathematical equations worked from left to right, just like reading. Perhaps that’s why I don’t even know how to score a game of bowling?

And just like that, Perversion is introduced on a Monday!

So was he confirming as he said, which doesn’t make sense, or did he want to ask for confirmation?

It wasn’t a question gramatically. But, she might not have been supposed to answer it if that information was actually what was being tested (i.e. had the kids learned PEMDAS, etc.)

Wow. A relevant question from Caulfield, what a concept. Mrs. Olsen needs to put that one in her diary.

It came at you from nowhere – you didn’t stand a chance!

Most people have heard of acronyms — pronounceable words comprising the initials of phrases. Examples include SCUBA (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus); ROY G. BIV for the colors of the rainbow; PEMDAS for the order of mathematical operations (parentheses, exponentiation, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction); LASER (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation); SNAFU, the soldier’s lament at the workings of fate; TANSTAAFL, Heinlein’s alert that everything has a price; and the barely wordish PRNDL for your automatic gearshift.

Then there’s the reverse of that — phrases intended to help you remember a sequence of letters. There’s the astronomer’s “Oh Be A Fine Girl Kiss Me Right Now, Smack” (a mnemonic for the spectral classification of stars) as well as “Every Good Boy Does Fine”, which represents the lines in the musical notation for the treble clef. The spaces don’t need a phrase, since they spell FACE. However, in the bass clef we needed “All Cars Eat Gas” back before electric cars and now we use “All Cows Eat Grass” for the spaces and “Grandma Bakes Donuts Friday Afternoon” for the lines.

Finally there’s the case of made-up words (not phrases) to help you remember sequences of letters. There aren’t very many of these. The most familiar are QWERTYUIOP for the top row of the Sholes keyboard, the typographer’s ETAOIN SHRDLU for the most common letters in English, and GAPaG T. ReX for the movie-rating system. To this select list we can add the telegrapher’s EISHTMOAN, which requires some ’splainin’:

E •

I • •

S • • •

H • • • •

T –

M – –

O – – –

A • –

N – •

Facebook is full of people that do not know what Caulfield stated.

Amazing how many people come out of school thinking PEMDAS (/BEDMAS) has to be followed slavishly IN THAT PRECISE ORDER when in fact it should be P → E → (M/D) → (A/S) where M & D have equal priority and are evaluated left-to-right, followed by A & S then having equal priority and being evaluated left-to-right.

Or, y’know, don’t write equations with crappy formatting that can be misunderstood…