I understand every word of this, yet have no idea how any of it ties together.
I feel this worth mentioning (or repeating, since I’m old and have no idea whether I’ve already said various things): my entire teaching career totaled less than a year, yet I had no problem keeping kids like Caulfield from disrupting the class with irrelevant questions.
And I had some kids who were smarter than Caulfield.
Comics I Don't Understand 
I don’t understand this, either. But my first reaction to the question was that Dickens was English while groundhogs are American.
“The dickens” is about the strongest language she’s allowed to use in response to his questioning.
Caulfield’s question is just a reference to the funny names of some Dickens characters, e. g. Chuzzlewit, Blimber,Tattycoram.
Sure and she’ll ask “What the *dickens* is going on here…
Am I the only one annoyed by the presumption that the teacher knows less about Dickens than the elementary schoolkid?
The Steam Pig was the first book in the Kramer & Zondi mystery series by James McClure.
The only series that ended with the heroes getting necklaced.
Seems a little rough for Frazz.
“Am I the only one annoyed by the presumption that the teacher knows less about Dickens than the elementary schoolkid?”
WHAT presumption that the teacher knows less about Dickens than the elementary schoolkid?
HE’s asking HER a question.
(Although, I wouldn’t expect an elementary schoolteacher to have much knowledge of Dickens. He’s tedious to read, and we don’t subject students to Dickens until later in their academic careers. She doesn’t have to know Dickens for her job, and nobody has to know Dickens for their personal life.)
Not knowing what “necklaced” was, and figuring a general Internet search on that term would return lots of un-unseeable results not even necessarily related to the term as used here, I looked up Kramer & Zondi in Wikipedia, which gave a nice summary, and even included that it explored in a critical way lots of aspects of Apartheid era South Africa, including “Necklacing” — without providing a definition or a link for that term!
Am I being unreasonable that this cannot be a term that most people would be familiar with?
And I still don’t know what it means, so look out senses, here comes the Internet…
Well, it seems that the Internet expects that I should be familiar with the term, as it unambiguously returned one (rather grisly) definition, related to South Africa and the Apartheid era ; if the results of a passive search on DuckDuckGo could be seen as holding me in disdain, these results have done so…
I like Dickens: his dark humor is very good (e.g. the first chapter of Great Expectations). Sure, it’s a bit lengthy but it’s ok if you read it a little at a time, as it was published originally. From time to time, I open Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Little Dorrit, Bleak House, or A Tale of Two Cities. And he has nothing to do with academics for me as he’s not studied in France (we stick to French writers: Balzac anyone ?)
“Balzac anyone ?”
Which is exactly what I was talking about when I was talking about those un-unseeable internet searches…
“I like Dickens”
“Sure, it’s a bit lengthy”
Dickens needed a copy-editor to cut the excessive wordiness. Dickens was paid by the word, and it shows. Look at how often his plot setups have been re-used in other media projects… third, probably, behind Bible and Shakespeare… that’s a pretty good indication that the guy knew how to set up a plot. But 300-word sentences mean that you’ve lost track of what the sentence is about halfway through, and that’s for a strong reader. weaker readers get left behind.
“For someone who’s not a Dickens expert” after the question implies that she doesn’t know the subject as well as him. And if she’s an elementary school teacher, she has a Master’s Degree and almost certainly took some fairly intensive literature courses.
And Dickens style is quite good once you get used to it. The wordiness is part of the sarcasm, the prose becomes poetry. I only like him at his best, though, because his plots tend to sometimes seem almost random (such as in Great Expectations when Mrs Havisham suddenly catches on fire and dies). His novels were written in installments, and you can tell. But A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, and A Tale of Two Cities are absolutely fantastic.
Necklacing had a brief run, thank goodness. If you weren’t paying attention during the end of Apartheid, you missed it.
Not knowing what “necklaced” was, and figuring a general Internet search on that term would return lots of un-unseeable results not even necessarily related to the term as used here, I looked up Kramer & Zondi in Wikipedia, which gave a nice summary, and even included that it explored in a critical way lots of aspects of Apartheid era South Africa, including “Necklacing” — without providing a definition or a link for that term!
If you look again at the opening paragraph of the Wikipedia article, the word is linked to their article on the subject.
“Am I the only one annoyed by the presumption that the teacher knows less about Dickens than the elementary schoolkid?”
No. But that’s the comic Frazz for you….
Hypocritical too, as the only evidence of the cartoonists knowledge is the assumptions “dickens” as an archaic spinsterly curse is a worthwhile pun and that the author had characters with silly names.
“necklacing” without a reference to South Africa or Apartheid would not be recognized by most. With reference to Apartheid or South Africa I imagine it would be but not as well as it would have in the late 80s to mid 90s.
To be fair, Kramer and Zondi were not necklaced on-screen. In a prequel (The last novel written in 1991 and the only on written post-apartheid) set in 1962 a seer foretold they would be. As a literary device it is to be understood that the vision was accurate. Which was fairly severe and shocking but it made it clear that Kramer and Zondi were product of Apartheid and wouldn’t survive past it.
never send an encyclopedia to do a dictionary’s job.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/necklacing
“If you look again at the opening paragraph of the Wikipedia article, the word is linked to their article on the subject.”
Yeah… I wonder why that is…. ;-)
FWIW, I have an aunt and uncle in SA whose farm was ‘repatriated’.
I didn’t want to see any images of “necklacing” but when I read the description, I was pretty sorry to see that, too. I don’t remember seeing it when it was a thing. Thank goodness.
“‘For someone who’s not a Dickens expert’ after the question implies that she doesn’t know the subject as well as him.”
Or it implies that she doesn’t claim to be a Dickens expert.
” And if she’s an elementary school teacher, she has a Master’s Degree and almost certainly took some fairly intensive literature courses.”
I have a Master’s degree, and it required approximately 0 intensive literature courses. My mother has a Master’s degree in Education, and it required exactly 0 intensive literature courses. Also, a funny thing about people who have degrees in Education is that they don’t usually have degrees in other things. You’re more likely to run into someone who took intensive literature courses in law school than in a public school, because the most common undergraduate degrees for law students is English.
It’s possible to earn an undergraduate degree without ever taking a literature course, “fairly intensive” or not. A high-school level English teacher has probably taken quite a few literature courses, to earn the specialization endorsement. But Mrs. Olsen is NOT a high-school-level English teacher… or even an English teacher. So, “almost certainly” turns out to be grossly inflated… there’s at least as good a chance that she hasn’t taken any English literature classes since leaving high school herself.
‘Necklacing’ is still a thing in some parts of the world where there are rebellions and revolutions . . . we just don’t read or hear about ’em as much. I know I’ve read about it happening somewhere recently, maybe in 2018.
Apartheid ended in 1994; if you google the history or other stories about necklacing, you’ll see that it still takes place in Africa and Haiti.
He could have as easily asked why there are no J.K. Rowling characters named Whistlepig. She gave us Ludo Bagman, Millicent Bulstrode, Bartemius Crouch Jr. and Sr., Amos Diggory, Albus and Aberforth Dumbledore, Argus Filch, Filius Flitwick, Whilhelmina Grubbly-Plank, Rubeus Hagrid, Neville Longbottom and many others at least as Dickensian as any of Dickens’. But nobody but Dickens ever gets credit for Dickensian names.
Too popular to be respectable. Wait 150 years.
Trevor Noah’s autobiography Born a Crime contains a vivid description of necklacing — which isn’t necessarily a recommendation
@Mark in Boston: Mervyn Peake’s GORMENGHAST books are also noted for outre names; Whistlepig would have fit right in. I especially like the Prunesquallor family.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gormenghast_(series)#Characters
“Which is exactly what I was talking about when I was talking about those un-unseeable internet searches…”
I’m not sure about the difficulty but here’s a link to a list of Balzac’s works: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor%C3%A9_de_Balzac
Olivier: the “difficulty” is a very childish pun on the name; admittedly, you’d probably run into more problems doing a voice search that actually typing “Balzac” (unless you didn’t know the spelling and went phonetically…)
Oh. Ok. Stupid me. Thanks for clarifying. Now, I will never forget this association :) .