For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for March 23, 2025

A child’s first time using a sharpener

April unsupervised. Shocking.

Pencil crayons? Maybe she means colored pencils. I don’t know pencil crayons.

At least, the little nitwit had the decency to empty the pencil sharpener.

Aww she was trying to help.

Life is a grind.

That’s because you are probably not Canadian!

There’s just one minor problem… I DO NOT RECALL GIVING YOUR PERMISSION!! By the way, my answer would’ve been a big fat NO if you did ask!

Actually, that’s not how those sharpeners work. Once the pencil is sharp, it would be beyond the strength of that child to grind any more off.

Kids will call them what they want.

Thank goodness Elizabeth didn’t get a box full of fine tipped magic markers! Michael might have told April that they need to go through the “magic marker sharpener” before they worked!

Too late!

I used to sharpen my crayons in the pencil sharpener. Easier to stay inside the lines and the pictures looked neater. My teacher and my mother didn’t appreciate it. Hard to get the shavings out of the canister I learned.

pencil crayon is a term used in some parts of Canada for coloured pencils. It said pencil crayons on the box from a particular brand when I was a child. A friend of mine from Montreal said that we anglophones were miss reading it and crayon was simply the French translation but I recall that the french for pencil crayon was written underneath. I can’t call them anything other than pencil crayons. ps. I am not from the same part of Canada as Lynn Johnson

In French the word for pencil is crayon

um… thanks. :{

Thanks a LOT, April… LOL

Oh my goodness, April, what and why did you do that?

And some people say that a job can never be done too well.

One doesn’t see those big gray pencil sharpeners much these days. Used to be that there were cheapie plastic pencil sharpeners in every elementary school “kit”. Some older offices had sophisticated electric versions. The previous owner of our house had one (almost a duplicate of the one in the strip) in a basement room. There’s a little rotating disc that lets it accommodate different diameter pencils.

Either way, April seems to have fun with both sharpening the crayons and dumping the shavings. BTW I never heard the term “pencil crayon”.

The artist in me wants to use those colorful shavings for a project

I first heard them called pencil crayons when a Canadian friend referred to them as pencil crayons. What a great description.

“Pencil crayons go by many names. A large portion of Canadians refers to them as ‘pencil crayons’ whereas Americans tend to call them ’coloured pencils. ’ Meanwhile, in Britain, they are commonly referred to as ’colouring pencils.”

This is another one of those comic strips that could have been done in 4 panels. Panels 1, 3, 8 and 9 are all you need. Lynn Johnston often talked about how she was used to 4-panel comic strips and never really knew how to fill the extra space on Sundays.

Definitely colored pencils.

Is she REALLY that dumb?

Also, why can she say “them” but can’t save "ElizabETH?

They are what we Americans call ‘colored pencils’ —wooden pencils with wax or oil cores that make marks in various colors. The outside of the wood is usually the same color as the cores. Because Canada requires labeling in both English and French, the words ‘pencil’ and ‘crayons’ are both printed on the boxes (usually in that order.) Labeled like that, it’s a easy step to calling them ‘pencil crayons.’

Given their use, it’s a durn good name for them

Silly & Funny, must be Sunday ! ;-)

Well,good luck getting the gunk out of the pencil sharpener…..