Or ‘why?’ which is pretty normal in a child, or so I’ve been told.
“Who” would not be annoying, given it’s what owls are supposed to say. Thus the owlet annoys its parent with a string of “When?” questions– the apparent owl equivalent of the incessant chain of “Why?” questions, or the frequently repeated “Are we there yet?”
“Why?” would have worked much better. There’s a popular meme of Simpsons’ character Rainer Wolfcastle doing stand-up with the caption, “That’s the joke.” As is so often the case with Bill’s puzzlement, it applies.
He’ll grow up to be a historian.
Emo Philips: “You know who I hate?”
Audience: “Who?!”
Emo Philips: “People who imitate owls. But it’s OK, you didn’t know that…”
Not that it would have qualified this panel for the LOL pages, but if the little owl had been asking “Where? Where? Where?“, it might have elicited a chuckle from readers who know German, because of the following tricky reversal:
English “Who?” == German “Wer?“, but
English “Where?” == German “Wo?“.
Actually, Daniel, a good historian deals with “Why?”
I’m thinking that “when” is the baby owl version of “are we there yet?”
Bill: I once had a student complain to me that her history professor wanted them to know the significance of events, and the reasons that they happened, and not just memorize dates and names.
it just doesn’t make much sense. The nearest I can tell is human children drive their parents nuts by asking “why, why, why” all the time. The cartoonist did a brain fart and confused “why” with “who” and figured that because owls naturally say the question word human children say all the time, it’d be funny if the owl asked another question word.
Similarly, WW (sort of), when I was substitute-teaching a fifth grade class some years back, the history unit was on the lead-up to the Revolutionary War. We had some good “why” discussions, since it’s not as simple as we’re generally taught in elementary school.
Of course the teacher wasn’t happy that I’d gone off-script, which in hindsight I do understand.
Mike – my thought also.
Winter Wallaby – the who, the why, a bit of the where is the fun of it all.
Meryl: I can’t see the point of learning history at all if it’s just memorizing a bunch of dates and names. To me, the why seems to be the whole point of it. You have to remember names, dates, and places because you need them to make the why coherent, but otherwise they’re useless unless you need them to win at Jeopardy! or something.
Bill: But the explanation in elementary school is the most patriotic!
I have to confess I was always terrible at names and dates in school (still am, although I read tons of history books now) — but I always made sure I understood the why’s.
Unfortunately that’s not what they test you on…
I am completely made for these times: I can look up dates and names on my phone in seconds, so that’s now the most expendable part of knowing history.
I bet they still test heavily on dates and names, though, since those are the easiest to grade.
I just checked, and it turns out the causes of the Revolutionary War actually are pretty simple.
And this just came into my mailbox, which may have some relevance, or at least make for interesting reading for those who like to know the why’s and wherefores . . . https://mailchi.mp/delanceyplace.com/nkzq5r5ddq?e=0f3d9bcdb8
(and I see that my previous long comment is in moderation for ?)
Every time I hear an owl saying “who” I think of an old Gilda Radner song:
The rooster crows good morning, with a cock-a-doodle-doo.
A horse’s neigh is just his way of saying “How are you?”
The lion growls “hello” and owls ask why? and where? and who?
May I suggest you get undressed and show them your wazoo!
There’s a slightly different owl joke in today’s “Mutts”:
As any parent will tell you, it should be Why? Why? Why? And then they graduate to How? How? How does that work?
As for the history discussion, I finally learned some of that in College, where I had a teacher who taught all the whys and hows of what lead up to significant events. I had always thought that the assassination of one Archduke seemed like an unlikely reason to start a world war. It was never explained that that event was just the last straw in a long line of things. It was the most interesting history class I ever had. (My biggest complaint about all our history classes is that we never learned anything after WW2. We would run out of time and the teacher would basically say here’s the answers to the 2 questions on the final that happened after WW2. So I only have vague info about Korea, Vietnam, Watergate, etc.)
Wendy: Dave Barry commented that he learned American History as an endless cycle that went from the Revolutionary War to WW2, and then reset.
” We would run out of time and the teacher would basically say here’s the answers to the 2 questions on the final that happened after WW2. So I only have vague info about Korea, Vietnam, Watergate, etc.)”
I moved between schools from one that taught geography, then US History, to one that taught US History, then geography. So I learned a LOT of geography and never got the first half of US History, so for me, everything starts with Reconstruction, and ends with Watergate (we watched “All the President’s Men” in class.)
Winter Wallaby – I was never as good in history (or social studies as it was called). My interest leaned more towards 1400s-1500s British history. I was also never very good at remembering dates.
When as an adult we would go to different battlefields and historic sites it made more sense and was much more interesting. Once I started to think of events and “things” in their historic context (such as placing “Little Women” into the historic context of the US Civil War and Louisa May Alcott’s life) it was a lot different than how it was taught.
I have now gotten to the point where as “Anne Everyman” I can converse with people over the course of a day (and in December for several evenings in a row) as if I was a person living in the 1770s. I still don’t remember many of the dates and check with husband before new events as to what would be going on. I try to think as Anne, although of course I don’t really as I know what to say to modern people and when asked about things such as electricity (yes, Anne does know about it – she saw a demonstration of it at the Tavern when her husband, Alec, took her there) can understand where the questioner is coming from. The life of the people and what is going on around them is history much more interesting than it is taught in school.
We once did a program with 3 “stations” in middle school and over the day every class in 8th grade came through. Robert and I at our station were talking about life and clothing – in first person – and some children understood what we were saying and some did not. If Robert talked about something they should know about – say Concord and Lexington – they had no idea. Their teachers were so upset that the kids did not remember what they had taught them.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Or ‘why?’ which is pretty normal in a child, or so I’ve been told.
“Who” would not be annoying, given it’s what owls are supposed to say. Thus the owlet annoys its parent with a string of “When?” questions– the apparent owl equivalent of the incessant chain of “Why?” questions, or the frequently repeated “Are we there yet?”
“Why?” would have worked much better. There’s a popular meme of Simpsons’ character Rainer Wolfcastle doing stand-up with the caption, “That’s the joke.” As is so often the case with Bill’s puzzlement, it applies.
He’ll grow up to be a historian.
Emo Philips: “You know who I hate?”
Audience: “Who?!”
Emo Philips: “People who imitate owls. But it’s OK, you didn’t know that…”
Not that it would have qualified this panel for the LOL pages, but if the little owl had been asking “Where? Where? Where?“, it might have elicited a chuckle from readers who know German, because of the following tricky reversal:
English “Who?” == German “Wer?“, but
English “Where?” == German “Wo?“.
Actually, Daniel, a good historian deals with “Why?”
I’m thinking that “when” is the baby owl version of “are we there yet?”
Bill: I once had a student complain to me that her history professor wanted them to know the significance of events, and the reasons that they happened, and not just memorize dates and names.
it just doesn’t make much sense. The nearest I can tell is human children drive their parents nuts by asking “why, why, why” all the time. The cartoonist did a brain fart and confused “why” with “who” and figured that because owls naturally say the question word human children say all the time, it’d be funny if the owl asked another question word.
Similarly, WW (sort of), when I was substitute-teaching a fifth grade class some years back, the history unit was on the lead-up to the Revolutionary War. We had some good “why” discussions, since it’s not as simple as we’re generally taught in elementary school.
Of course the teacher wasn’t happy that I’d gone off-script, which in hindsight I do understand.
Mike – my thought also.
Winter Wallaby – the who, the why, a bit of the where is the fun of it all.
Meryl: I can’t see the point of learning history at all if it’s just memorizing a bunch of dates and names. To me, the why seems to be the whole point of it. You have to remember names, dates, and places because you need them to make the why coherent, but otherwise they’re useless unless you need them to win at Jeopardy! or something.
Bill: But the explanation in elementary school is the most patriotic!
I have to confess I was always terrible at names and dates in school (still am, although I read tons of history books now) — but I always made sure I understood the why’s.
Unfortunately that’s not what they test you on…
I am completely made for these times: I can look up dates and names on my phone in seconds, so that’s now the most expendable part of knowing history.
I bet they still test heavily on dates and names, though, since those are the easiest to grade.
I just checked, and it turns out the causes of the Revolutionary War actually are pretty simple.
https://youtu.be/p8BwWBc571k?t=65
And this just came into my mailbox, which may have some relevance, or at least make for interesting reading for those who like to know the why’s and wherefores . . .
https://mailchi.mp/delanceyplace.com/nkzq5r5ddq?e=0f3d9bcdb8
(and I see that my previous long comment is in moderation for ?)
Speaking of learning from history, or from one’s own misteaks –
https://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2018/10/16
Every time I hear an owl saying “who” I think of an old Gilda Radner song:
The rooster crows good morning, with a cock-a-doodle-doo.
A horse’s neigh is just his way of saying “How are you?”
The lion growls “hello” and owls ask why? and where? and who?
May I suggest you get undressed and show them your wazoo!
There’s a slightly different owl joke in today’s “Mutts”:
As any parent will tell you, it should be Why? Why? Why? And then they graduate to How? How? How does that work?
As for the history discussion, I finally learned some of that in College, where I had a teacher who taught all the whys and hows of what lead up to significant events. I had always thought that the assassination of one Archduke seemed like an unlikely reason to start a world war. It was never explained that that event was just the last straw in a long line of things. It was the most interesting history class I ever had. (My biggest complaint about all our history classes is that we never learned anything after WW2. We would run out of time and the teacher would basically say here’s the answers to the 2 questions on the final that happened after WW2. So I only have vague info about Korea, Vietnam, Watergate, etc.)
Wendy: Dave Barry commented that he learned American History as an endless cycle that went from the Revolutionary War to WW2, and then reset.
” We would run out of time and the teacher would basically say here’s the answers to the 2 questions on the final that happened after WW2. So I only have vague info about Korea, Vietnam, Watergate, etc.)”
I moved between schools from one that taught geography, then US History, to one that taught US History, then geography. So I learned a LOT of geography and never got the first half of US History, so for me, everything starts with Reconstruction, and ends with Watergate (we watched “All the President’s Men” in class.)
Winter Wallaby – I was never as good in history (or social studies as it was called). My interest leaned more towards 1400s-1500s British history. I was also never very good at remembering dates.
When as an adult we would go to different battlefields and historic sites it made more sense and was much more interesting. Once I started to think of events and “things” in their historic context (such as placing “Little Women” into the historic context of the US Civil War and Louisa May Alcott’s life) it was a lot different than how it was taught.
I have now gotten to the point where as “Anne Everyman” I can converse with people over the course of a day (and in December for several evenings in a row) as if I was a person living in the 1770s. I still don’t remember many of the dates and check with husband before new events as to what would be going on. I try to think as Anne, although of course I don’t really as I know what to say to modern people and when asked about things such as electricity (yes, Anne does know about it – she saw a demonstration of it at the Tavern when her husband, Alec, took her there) can understand where the questioner is coming from. The life of the people and what is going on around them is history much more interesting than it is taught in school.
We once did a program with 3 “stations” in middle school and over the day every class in 8th grade came through. Robert and I at our station were talking about life and clothing – in first person – and some children understood what we were saying and some did not. If Robert talked about something they should know about – say Concord and Lexington – they had no idea. Their teachers were so upset that the kids did not remember what they had taught them.