Get Fuzzy by Darby Conley for April 30, 2012

my head hurts

I feel this will not end well.

Thanks, Satch. I ought to have known about this variation of naught, but I really didn’t have a single clue. Nought. Glad we both found aught to take away from this football series besides land dives and head knots. And I don’t care whether or not I’ve got this correct, ’cause now my head hurts, too.

“What that?” “Knot hole.” “I know it not hole…but what it is really?”

" Noughton! [sic]"Jackie Gleason circa 1950’s TV

These days I find that most published journalists (on and off the web) can’t differentiate between ought and aught. Ought is a modal verb meaning “should.” Aught means “anything.” Is there aught you can do when they tell you you “aught to” when they mean you “ought to”?Yahoo! UK is one perpetrator of orthographic and grammatical howlers on a regular basis.

I’m in England, and a football score of 1-0 would normally be spoken of as “one nil”. We do use nought for zero, but not usually in a soccer related context. I do wonder where Darby gets his English influence from though – maybe he lived here for a while?

Satch is being noughty today….

“I’m in England, and a football score of 1-0 would normally be spoken of as “one nil”. We do use nought for zero, but not usually in a soccer related context. I do wonder where Darby gets his English influence from though – maybe he lived here for a while?”Maybe Canada?

Naught and nought make me hungry for nougat. Or doughnuts.Nil. Nil doesn’t make me as hungry. End the game One-nil. No bagel.

If you’re giving a gentle imperative…it’s “ought to..” and if you mean, uncertainty, perhaps or maybe…it’s “for aught…” ie, ‘for aught I know…" but I’ve seen ‘ought’ used for the other. By English authors, too, I believe. For aught I know. I ought to check further.

Agreed…I’ve always heard “nil” equated to zero goals in English soccer, not “naught.”

And I remember watching reruns of “The Two Ronnies,” Pacopuddy. Clever guys, more so than Benny Hill was to me. My favorite had to be “A Bit of Fry & Laurie.” People here in the States who watch “House” have NIL idea how much of a mugging crackup Hugh Laurie can be. He and Stephen Fry (who also wrote a hilarious short story on cricket called Bloody Lucky") played very well off each other.

As in “double nought” spy (i.e. 007) from “The Beverly Hillbillies”

Satchel’s “wait for it” was priceless.

orinoco womble, tigre 1 — Thanks. I love you guys. Saving the language from being terminally dumbed-down may be a lost cause, but we shall go down with the ship together, with our heads held high. :]

I dread “nought.”

Oh, Bucky. Do not fret or fuss as it will be all for naught!

Surfstuff — the two Ronnies did complicated wordplay; Abbott and Costello played buffoons.Before everybody jumps me…. hey, I loved Abbot and Costello, and it took brains to play the lowbrow characters they did so well….but the Two Ronnies were much more cerebral.

elglish accents get annoying after a while (no pun taken)

Oh no … is it a whole (hole?) week (weak?) of words sounding the same?

What is the difference between “naught” and “nought?” (And yes, I realize that mathematically speaking, the answer is nil.) The New Oxford American Dictionary lists ‘nought’ as a varient of ‘naught.’ From the context, I wonder if Satchel is implying ‘naught’ to mean ‘nothing’ and ‘nought’ to mean ‘zero.’ What do our British fellows have to say?