All right, so it’s just not possible that he is learning this for the first time now. But it’s still a nice pun.
Let’s just allude to the story-pun that ends with “He’s a dead ringer for his brother”!
This Bizarro is from Andréa.
This DSOH from Andréa and others:
Comics I Don't Understand 
Apologies, but I have no idea what the lawyer thought the judge was saying.
And I don’t know the story that ends with the “dead ringer” line.
@Powers, for the Fusco Brothers one, think of voir dire being pronounced as French rather than weird Legal Latin – then the lawyer thought the judge was addressing him as Dear.
I translated it to ‘You’re dire’ . . . (of a warning or threat) presaging disaster.
It”s pronounced vwar deer. (Nothing like the English word dire, dye-er.)
And the cartoonist presumes the reader knows that, so the joke is, as was said, that he is suggesting the judge was calling him Dear.
One day Quasimodo’s brother filled in for him in the bell tower. But he was less experienced and a little careless, and slipped and fell to the ground. The authorities inspecting the body at first said it was Quasimodo himself. But soon realized it was not. But their mistake was understandable, as the deceased was…. A dead ringer for his brother!
Thank you for that clarification, Dana K . . . but having had several years of French and Latin, I knew it. I was referring to the LOOKS of the word, not the SOUND of it.
@Andréa, but how would the written form account for Lawyer Fusco’s mistake over what the judge was saying in court? (BTW does anybody here follow the strip closely enough to identify which Fusco Brother this is?)
I don’t have the actual quote available, but James Thurber once did a series of cartoon pictures of imaginary beasts the names of which were common English language words. When he got tired of doing this, he wrote to his editor saying something like, “I know that you won’t want a female grouch nursing a grudge.”
re ” weird Legal Latin” (pronunciations)
Yes, it makes my jaw drop when I’m watching some committee hearing or the like, and the chair says “This committee is adjourned sigh-knee dye-ee“. [For sine die “without a day (date set to reconvene)”. ]
I know there are some disagreements among scholars as to what Latin sounded like. But the macron over a vowel, whether or not it literally makes the sound longer, cannot reasonably be taken as marking what English takes as a long vowel. Personally — and naively, I admit — I would be happy if people just treated it like Spanish or Italian.
SteveHL thanks for that Thurber recollection. It sounds like he is putting the reason in his example not just on how many is too many, but on the prospect of showing the female grouch nursing that grudge!
After Quasimodo’s brother died, Quasimodo had to line up another potential substitute ringer so he held open auditions. The first applicant started from the far end and ran as fast as he could directly into the bell, hitting it full on with his face. BONG! The bell gave out the most beautiful tone Quasimodo had ever heard.
Quasi said “Do that again!” The applicant went back toward the far end, ran toward the bell and missed! And he fell straight out the window and landed on the pavement. Quasimodo realized he had never even asked the man’s name.
Quasi ran down the stairs and found Claude Frollo examining the dead body. Frollo said “Who is this?” Quasi said “I don’t know but his face rings a bell.”
Danny Boy – LD: I was an altar boy way back before Vatican II, and you would have liked the pronunciation of “Church Latin”, basically Italian.
Ray-jee-na Chay-lee, Lay-ta-ray, Al-lay-lu-ya. (Regina Coeli, laetare, alleluia.)
“I don’t know but his face rings a bell.”
i was going to mention this one, but you got there first.
Does the name “Rhett Butler” wrong a belle?
The Fusco Brothers strip seems utterly plausible if you follow the Murdaugh Murders podcast which centres on a thitrd generation lawyer of several decades experience who did not know the meaning of “habeas corpus” until he found himself in jail for alleged crimes, and his lawyer explained it to him.
Jury selection, BTW, is just one of several types of “voir dire” hearings.
“think of voir dire being pronounced as French”
Since no one has explicitly said it, I feel compelled to point out that “voir dire” IS French.
Because French was the “Lingua Franca” of communication over Europe and the United Nations, the main two options of non-English legalese are Latin and Old French. (dead languages are very stable; That’s also why the King James version of the Bible didn’t use the form of English in use at the time it was written.)) (I don’t know in what era the phase “voir dire” came about. I also don’t know whether or not Old French pronunciation differed much from 1900s French.)
It is assumed that Old English sounded nothing like today’s, so why not the same principle with French?
Latin is interesting, in that it is both dead (as in stable) and alive, as in active daily use in Ecclesiastical form. The latter has pronounciation rules based on Italian. Classical Latin has “rules” heavily influenced by the phonology of the native language of theperson setting the rules.
In this case, it’s not even French exactly. Like English, there were and probably to an extent still are, dialects. The Norman conquerors had a specific dialect that differed significantly from Parisian French.