Not Any Way
The nominees for Most Violent Assault on the English Language are:- Saggy...what? - One presumes the inteant was to say that the ratings are getting saggy, However, the text actually says that Britney, Lindsay, and Paris are getting saggy.
- Regular or Racial? - Sensitive-o-meter. Enough said.
- Too many words - Requiring just 8 words to tell properly "Hello, Roger, I was just thinking of you."), Mallard uses 23 instead, with predictable results.
- Not Any Way - Using "not any way" instead of "no way" is just one about a half-dozen assaults on the language in this miserable bit of doggerel.
- One Little Word - When attempting to be taken seriously, it would help if the writer understood the difference between "revealed to Al Gore" and "revealed by Al Gore" and was able to use the appropriate one.
7 comments:
Britney/Lindsay/Paris, no doubt. That one's just confusing, while also being deeply ironic in that it seems to contain insufficient verbiage (a rarity in a Mallard strip). Are the ratings saggy? The women? The young girls? Why is the first media guy's statement finished by another person? Speaking of which, who ARE these people? Where are they? It makes no sense, Tinsley! None!
I think the "revealed to" bit is meant to indicate that us libruls think of Gore as some sort of prophet through whom God makes his ineffable will known--in that sense, I think that comic's okay. And ONLY that sense.
The Britney thing is bad, but I have to vote for that horrific "speech code" thing on general principle, for its grave crimes against poetry in general. That just will not stand.
In the Global War On English, "One Little Word" strikes a precision-guided blow for the forces of ignorance.
The others are worthy assaults on our Mother Tongue, but tend not to strike her so much as to smother her in buckets of lard.
Not Any Way violates the rules of grammar, sentence structure, punctuation, parenthetical statements, scheme, scansion and, probably, other things. This is, truly, horrific writing.
It was the missing quotation mark that put Not Any Way over the top for me.
I'm going to give Blallard credit for a deliberate double entendre on "Saggy" and I thing GeoX got it right on "one litle word." "Too many words" is too bland to be a contender.
I have to go with "Not any way" because of the poor quality of the duckerel.
WV:reduc - to analyze duckerel
I am completely unable to figure out a suitable "they" for the "saggy" punchline to refer to. If the subject is the trio of twentysomething media starlets, the comment is a non-sequitur; even more so if the subject is "young girls". And it can't be "ratings", because neither character mentions ratings in their odd, sentence-dividing conversation.
The poetry may be Vogon-quality bad, but it's at least minimally comprehensible.
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