[60s dad]All the boys look like girls these days![/60s dad]
I suppose it could be a guy. The rest of the group are. So the dad is probably mad for the same reason just with a not unsavory twist.
Being inconsistently wrong is more maddening to people.
In the real world I would agree. This strip is beholden to Escher.
That was the puzzle I needed to solve. The woman is thinking about her red-headed kid, the one who is on top of the roof dropping the ice cream on his dad. She’s a redhead but the dad isn’t.
What are the cottages on the far left thinking about? A peace symbol or a Mercedes?
Presumably, the cottages have people in them. The real puzzler is why the transformer on the power pole is thinking of electricity when it’s already full of it. Or that an inanimate object is thinking at all. Maybe that’s a warning that the machines are getting ready to strike.
Took me a while to see the seagull that’s sitting on the bench like a human.
So, a bunch of people have commented that they don’t know all of the context and backstory. And the OP identified the grammatically-annoyed character by name, so presumably, he’s familiar with the strip.
So how about it, @Steve_McQwark ? What can you tell us about these other characters?
Sorry, been doing family stuff today. The strip is called “Wallace the Brave” and Wallace is the boy in the middle thinking about being abducted by a UFO. His best friend, Spud, is standing in front of him thinking about the ridiculously tall ice cream cone. The red-headed woman on the left is his mother and the man with the ice cream on his head is his father. The boy on the roof is his younger brother who is quite possibly feral. The girl ordering chunky monkey is Wallace’s classmate, Amelia, and the apostrophe girl is another classmate, Rose. They are the main cast of the strip. i don’t know any backstory about the love-struck teens and the angry dad as I don’t recall ever seeing them before.
I knew about Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice cream, but I couldn’t make out how a dead monkey’s head was supposed to be chunky. And the attendant, who should know that name, had a sick look on his face as if she had asked for dead frozen monkey on a cone.
Ah well, real artists write stuff to please themselves and hope that others follow along.
As an apostrophe-haver, I have no idea what credit card companies do because every company and computer system is different. When you renew at a pharmacy, they ask for your prescription number and then read off the first 3-4 letters to confirm. The two pharmacies I use do different things. If phone support asks to spell your name, I come prepared with account numbers to try first to save everyone time. The especially delicious event is when one part of a computer system can create an apostrophe account, but another part breaks upon encountering it, but doesn’t tell you why.
Related: when we got married, my wife took my middle name AND my last name as her new last name, because my last name is very, very common. Her maiden name was unique in the world–literally, her grandfather was an orphan and they made up a name and nobody else has it. So she went from one extreme to the other.
Anyway, it’s not hyphenated. Which I think (39 years later) was a mistake, because it’s always a crapshoot whether she’s under “x y” or just “y” as a last name. Plus our state government can’t handle multi-word last names, so THEY hyphenate it, which means that depending on where a record originated, it might be “x y” “x-y”, or just “y”. This limitation must really irritate all the “van der whatevers” to no end!
Computers should make this stuff easier, but of course they make it worse, alas. (Having just retired after 46 years in the biz, I feel qualified to make that observation.)
Sadly, this isn’t true either. “Jean Pierre” might be two separate given names, but it might also be a single two-word given name.
I am more tolerant of those who mistake the apostrophe in “its” or “it’s”, though, because “its” does seem to break the rule. If I have a dog named Fido or Fifi, I can say “Fido chased Fido’s tail”, or “Fifi chased Fifi’s tail”, so it seems like I ought to be able to say “it chased it’s tail”: Apostrophe-s to indicate possession, just like usual.
I think that what’s going on there is that “its” isn’t actually “it” with an s attached to it; it’s a different word, like “her” vs. “she”, that just happens to look very similar. But it’s a subtle nuance that’s easily missed.
This is exactly right. In most cases, as in your example of “she” → “her”, the possessive determiner form of a pronoun is usually a completely different word than the original pronoun, except in the unfortunate case of it → its (where it’s also a completely different word with a confusing resemblance to the original pronoun).
Maybe a useful way to think about it for the easily befuddled is that a possessive pronoun never takes an apostrophe. This also prevents blunders like “that book is her’s” instead of “hers”. If there’s an exception to this rule, I’m not aware of it. So whenever an apostrophe appears within a pronoun, it always represents a contraction, like “she’s going out” or “she’d rather have it her own way”.
The Spanish custom is to have two last names, but the standard last name which is the father’s surname goes first. So Mr. Gómez and Mrs. López have a kid, who gets named Juan Gómez López. Most documents like DMV etc will inevitably remove the diacritics and interpret Gomez as a middle name and Lopez as a last name, even if steps are taken to enter both in the “Last name” field, so the usual practice is to hyphenate to avoid this so no middle if it’s not present, last name Gómez-Lopez which may or may not have an actual hyphen.
That’s to say nothing of the fading old-fashioned custom of including the maiden name to the mother with “y” in between.
Portuguese has a similar custom but the order is opposite so the kid is João Lopes Gomes (or Joao or even John). Problem mostly averted there. In English-speaking couples who give their kids a double barrel name, there’s no clear custom that dictates the order, so you’ll see both, but again hyphen saves the day. Sometimes.
I agree with you. BTW, “Pierre-Yves” is a common name, but I am not sure about (Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott) Trudeau— how many names are there in there, exactly? Elliott was from his mother, and his father was Joseph Charles-Émile, but is it “Philippe” + “Pierre Yves” or “Philippe” + “Pierre” + “Yves”, or have I already gone off track?
If you read really old literature, it was something like (h)it → his, but I do not think that “its” and “it’s” are completely unrelated to “it”— you have “it” + “s”, and there are older documents where they do use an apostrophe.