Frazz by Jef Mallett for March 28, 2012

or kind of dead.

His query was met with a deafening silence.

“We were barely 17, and we were barely dressed.”

Police found a partially-nude body. No, they found a partially-CLOTHED body!

I suppose one could say “hardly dressed,” but then Caulfield would ask if they were wearing armor.

It may not be logically possible, but since idiom is often *il*logical, the answer to the question doesn’t matter.

Barely dressed, barely nude……I’m getting confused.

I barely comprehend this question…

I just like the “Oh, joy…” part…I used to feel like that when the kid who takes 20 minutes to finish a sentence (because he would just go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and…well, you get it) would have something he needed to share lol

Oxymorons unveiled when you least expect it.

This could get pretty ugly…..

FIG LEAF!

Oxymorons are terribly nice and awful fun.

I hate being bipolar, its so awesome!

I’ve been called a grammar Nazi, and I call myself a grammar curmudgeon, but I like the term grammar emperor. Jeff: I posted this strip on my blog, The Writing Rag. I included a nice plug and a link.

I’m glad the partially clothed body was discovered. We were all upset when it was “found missing.”

But you can leave your hat on, you can leave your hat on. You can leave your hat on…

When will she learn to specify questions about what she had just been talking about? She sure is an easy target for Caulfield.

Maybe it’s a US/UK thing, but “barely” commonly means “only just” or “very nearly”. It’s a different word entirely to “bare”. Still very much in common use.The Grammar Emperor is a nice reference though :-)

Slightly off topic, but: when my wife was in New York for grad school, she had to explain what Seattleites by the difference between “partly cloudy” and “partly sunny”, while they tried to explain phrases like " there was no weather until late afternoon".

For some reason I read that as “barely depressed” and didn’t get the joke at first.