With only one “Sunday Funny”, that gives us plenty of time to study Serbo-Croatian morphology. It turns out that the “Ž” represents a “voiced postalveolar fricative“, approximately equivalent to the “si” in “television“, which means that it remains an adequate representation for Horace’s “sawing logs”.
From The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald. The central character, Florence Green, is in a bank attempting to get a loan to open a book store:
The [bank] manager replied soothingly that reading took up a great deal of time. ‘I only wish I had more time at my disposal. People have quite wrong ideas, you know, about the bank’s closing hours. Speaking personally, I enjoy very little leisure in the evenings. But don’t misunderstand me, I find a good book at my bedside of incalculable value. When I eventually retire I’ve no sooner read a few pages than I’m overwhelmed with sleep.’
Serbo-Croatian
a term for the South Slavic language spoken in Serbia, Croatia, and elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia. Serbo-Croat comprises two closely similar forms: Serbian, written in the Cyrillic alphabet, and Croat, written in the Roman alphabet. Since the breakup of Yugoslavia the names of the individual languages have generally been preferred.
In the Nineties, Slavic departments and Linguistics departments were indeed pressured to not list courses as dealing with Serbo-Croatian, because “There is no such language!”. Others would admit that “there had been” such a hybrid or compromise language, but it had not been a “natural creole” but rather an artificiality imposed upon the people by the politicians, at the time of formation of Yugoslavia.
The text in the second panel matches exactly with the fourth paragraph of Wikipedia’s article on Serbo-Croatian. Perhaps Samson selected that name because it was the most complicated sounding of the four possible sources given for the letter “Ž“.
My sister is a retired teacher. She used to say that whenever she had trouble sleeping, she’d read some union mailings.
I would add that I was aware of Serbo-Croatian from a fairly young age — not knowing anything about it, just that there was a language with that name. I was probably a little freaked out by my grandmother’s Parkinson tremors and speech difficulties when we visited her in the nursing home; and my mother tried to explain to me that she had been a very vital, capable, and very smart woman. She had immigrated here from Romania (my grandfather was from Poland and they met over here) , and spoke five languages. I foolishly asked which ones, and my mother said they included English, Yiddish, Romanian, and …. Serbo-Croatian!
With only one “Sunday Funny”, that gives us plenty of time to study Serbo-Croatian morphology.
Sorry, yesterday (Saturday) I ran across a nice OY but the Saturday OY listing was already out, so I used it to anchor the next OY, for August 6. But then I was confused and upon finding a good LOL I forgot it could still go in this one and instead used it to start the August 7 LOLs.
However — everyone, you are totally encouraged to send in the OYs and especially LOLs and genuine CIDUs you come across!
P.S. @Kilby, no morphology to be found there (the study of the formation of words in a language), Horace’s book (or wiki excerpt) has it right, it’s phonology (the study of sounds as they are used in a language).
I used to keep a statistics book next to my bed (my field). If I had trouble sleeping, I’d open it up and read. I’d either fall asleep or learn something new, often both.
@ Mitch – I had a feeling that it wasn’t exactly the right word, but “alphabet” sounded too simplistic. 😉 The “only one” was notintended as criticism: if that’s all that has been submitted, then that’s all that you can post.
Thanks for clarifying that your comment need not be seen as critical. But in turn I ought to clarify that there are shifts in the balance of how much of the OY and LOL weekly collections come from reader submissions and how much from the editors’ own sightings in the wild. — While still mostly adhering to Bill’s policy that reader submissions to LOL are almost entirely free of editorial selection (apart from exercising taste, and sometimes suggestions for reclassification) — if you send a comic in and say it strikes you as real funny, we will print it without quibbling. (Or if we just don’t get it, may offer to promote to full CIDU!) Maybe a regularly scheduled Call for Submissions is in order…
I can’t sleep unless the TV is on – very low and some show that keeps my attention just enough to keep my mind from wandering, but not something actually of interest. Lately I have been caught up in a show about people finding out if someone is their father (Judge something), a PBS show “Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum”, and an Australian children’s show – Bluey. (Apparently parents in Australia are willing to do just about anything for their children – the show involves a family of dogs living humanly in a house, etc. The parents seem to spend all their time with their pups – playing train by dad pushing them around the house on two chairs one behind the other while mom is all of the store keepers they pass, taking them on trips, putting the pups on the parents’ backs and pretending they are backpacks and a trip to a Ikea-like store (apparently based on a real store there) where the pups are in the seats of a shopping cart (backwards facing the cart) and arguing over which one will marry the gnome figure that one of them drops – for going to sleep they are good.
Also recite lists in my head – monarchs of England/Great Britain, Presidents and their wives, or states and capitals – latter is great as I know the letter assortment for the various states (such as which as 4 letters long) for when doing crossword puzzles at other times.
Basically I need to keep my mind fixed on something – if it wanders I don’t go to sleep. It is 3:30am – will finish snack, do the dishes and then we will go to bed.
Bill seemed to think it was important to attribute all submissions, as if he didn’t want to unfairly take credit for liking (or even not understanding) any particular comic. I don’t see anything wrong about accepting (and posting) all the LOLs as submitted, but that doesn’t mean that this has to happen right away. I’m more worried about the posts that contain too many comics than the ones that contain “only one”. Besides the effort of discussing a lot of different issues in a single thread, limiting the number of comics in each post would preserve a backlog in the queue. A dependable diet of weekend “funnies” (and “oy”s) is better than alternating between feast and famine. Luckily, most recent posts have tended toward the former, rather than the latter.
P.S. If the CIDU queue is getting short, then a call for submissions would be a good idea, but scheduling a periodic call would dull everyone’s senses.
P.P.S. Evidence would suggest that the “Ewww” queue has run entirely dry, but that’s fine, I wouldn’t go asking people to dig up that sort of material. I sometimes miss the occasional “Arlo” post, but it’s not worth setting up a second server, and for Bill’s sake I don’t think that stuff should appear on the main CIDU site.
I don’t really view Ewww as a separate category, that could be the only notable feature of a comic, and explain why it is being published here. That would be like saying “Let’s just see how disgusting a cartoonist can get!” But it’s fine as an additional descriptor when a cartoon comes up in some other category primarily. Then we get the hybrids, like CIDU-Eww or LOL-Eww or OY-Eww.
Comics I Don't Understand 
With only one “Sunday Funny”, that gives us plenty of time to study Serbo-Croatian morphology. It turns out that the “Ž” represents a “voiced postalveolar fricative“, approximately equivalent to the “si” in “television“, which means that it remains an adequate representation for Horace’s “sawing logs”.
From The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald. The central character, Florence Green, is in a bank attempting to get a loan to open a book store:
The [bank] manager replied soothingly that reading took up a great deal of time. ‘I only wish I had more time at my disposal. People have quite wrong ideas, you know, about the bank’s closing hours. Speaking personally, I enjoy very little leisure in the evenings. But don’t misunderstand me, I find a good book at my bedside of incalculable value. When I eventually retire I’ve no sooner read a few pages than I’m overwhelmed with sleep.’
Serbo-Croatiana term for the South Slavic language spoken in Serbia, Croatia, and elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia. Serbo-Croat comprises two closely similar forms: Serbian, written in the Cyrillic alphabet, and Croat, written in the Roman alphabet. Since the breakup of Yugoslavia the names of the individual languages have generally been preferred.
In the Nineties, Slavic departments and Linguistics departments were indeed pressured to not list courses as dealing with Serbo-Croatian, because “There is no such language!”. Others would admit that “there had been” such a hybrid or compromise language, but it had not been a “natural creole” but rather an artificiality imposed upon the people by the politicians, at the time of formation of Yugoslavia.
The text in the second panel matches exactly with the fourth paragraph of Wikipedia’s article on Serbo-Croatian. Perhaps Samson selected that name because it was the most complicated sounding of the four possible sources given for the letter “Ž“.
My sister is a retired teacher. She used to say that whenever she had trouble sleeping, she’d read some union mailings.
I would add that I was aware of Serbo-Croatian from a fairly young age — not knowing anything about it, just that there was a language with that name. I was probably a little freaked out by my grandmother’s Parkinson tremors and speech difficulties when we visited her in the nursing home; and my mother tried to explain to me that she had been a very vital, capable, and very smart woman. She had immigrated here from Romania (my grandfather was from Poland and they met over here) , and spoke five languages. I foolishly asked which ones, and my mother said they included English, Yiddish, Romanian, and …. Serbo-Croatian!
With only one “Sunday Funny”, that gives us plenty of time to study Serbo-Croatian morphology.
Sorry, yesterday (Saturday) I ran across a nice OY but the Saturday OY listing was already out, so I used it to anchor the next OY, for August 6. But then I was confused and upon finding a good LOL I forgot it could still go in this one and instead used it to start the August 7 LOLs.
However — everyone, you are totally encouraged to send in the OYs and especially LOLs and genuine CIDUs you come across!
P.S. @Kilby, no morphology to be found there (the study of the formation of words in a language), Horace’s book (or wiki excerpt) has it right, it’s phonology (the study of sounds as they are used in a language).
I used to keep a statistics book next to my bed (my field). If I had trouble sleeping, I’d open it up and read. I’d either fall asleep or learn something new, often both.
@ Mitch – I had a feeling that it wasn’t exactly the right word, but “alphabet” sounded too simplistic. 😉 The “only one” was notintended as criticism: if that’s all that has been submitted, then that’s all that you can post.
Thanks for clarifying that your comment need not be seen as critical. But in turn I ought to clarify that there are shifts in the balance of how much of the OY and LOL weekly collections come from reader submissions and how much from the editors’ own sightings in the wild. — While still mostly adhering to Bill’s policy that reader submissions to LOL are almost entirely free of editorial selection (apart from exercising taste, and sometimes suggestions for reclassification) — if you send a comic in and say it strikes you as real funny, we will print it without quibbling. (Or if we just don’t get it, may offer to promote to full CIDU!) Maybe a regularly scheduled Call for Submissions is in order…
I can’t sleep unless the TV is on – very low and some show that keeps my attention just enough to keep my mind from wandering, but not something actually of interest. Lately I have been caught up in a show about people finding out if someone is their father (Judge something), a PBS show “Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum”, and an Australian children’s show – Bluey. (Apparently parents in Australia are willing to do just about anything for their children – the show involves a family of dogs living humanly in a house, etc. The parents seem to spend all their time with their pups – playing train by dad pushing them around the house on two chairs one behind the other while mom is all of the store keepers they pass, taking them on trips, putting the pups on the parents’ backs and pretending they are backpacks and a trip to a Ikea-like store (apparently based on a real store there) where the pups are in the seats of a shopping cart (backwards facing the cart) and arguing over which one will marry the gnome figure that one of them drops – for going to sleep they are good.
Also recite lists in my head – monarchs of England/Great Britain, Presidents and their wives, or states and capitals – latter is great as I know the letter assortment for the various states (such as which as 4 letters long) for when doing crossword puzzles at other times.
Basically I need to keep my mind fixed on something – if it wanders I don’t go to sleep. It is 3:30am – will finish snack, do the dishes and then we will go to bed.
Bill seemed to think it was important to attribute all submissions, as if he didn’t want to unfairly take credit for liking (or even not understanding) any particular comic. I don’t see anything wrong about accepting (and posting) all the LOLs as submitted, but that doesn’t mean that this has to happen right away. I’m more worried about the posts that contain too many comics than the ones that contain “only one”. Besides the effort of discussing a lot of different issues in a single thread, limiting the number of comics in each post would preserve a backlog in the queue. A dependable diet of weekend “funnies” (and “oy”s) is better than alternating between feast and famine. Luckily, most recent posts have tended toward the former, rather than the latter.
P.S. If the CIDU queue is getting short, then a call for submissions would be a good idea, but scheduling a periodic call would dull everyone’s senses.
P.P.S. Evidence would suggest that the “Ewww” queue has run entirely dry, but that’s fine, I wouldn’t go asking people to dig up that sort of material. I sometimes miss the occasional “Arlo” post, but it’s not worth setting up a second server, and for Bill’s sake I don’t think that stuff should appear on the main CIDU site.
I don’t really view Ewww as a separate category, that could be the only notable feature of a comic, and explain why it is being published here. That would be like saying “Let’s just see how disgusting a cartoonist can get!” But it’s fine as an additional descriptor when a cartoon comes up in some other category primarily. Then we get the hybrids, like CIDU-Eww or LOL-Eww or OY-Eww.