Both Dirk the Daring and Targuman independently sent this one in, from Barney & Clyde last Monday.
“I don’t get and I don’t think anybody commenting on it gets it either. I follow the strip, and I read the strips that led up to this and I still don’t get it,” says one of our spotters. Well, here are those previous strips (from the preceding Friday and Saturday):
And as the other spotter puts it, “What does his age have to do with it? If we take today’s strip (Wed.) the only thing is perhaps ‘are we too young to date?’ Maybe.” Here is that follow-up from Wednesday (which is “today” at the time of setting up this post):
P.S. And one more strip on this same plot line:
Comics I Don't Understand 
The “Uh Oh” is the blonde kid realizing that Cynthia has a Thing for Connor. At 11, they both agree she’s too young for that sort of thing, but there you have it.
Could be her long lost twin – they look alike – are the same age. Hence the “oh oh.”
Although a boy and a girl would not be identical twins.
I predict, if this arc continues at all, that Cynthia’s grandpa and Connor’s grandma will meet, and possibly continue meeting. Some sort of synchronicity with the four of them will ensue.
“In 99.9% of cases boy/girl twins are non-identical. However, in some extremely rare cases resulting from a genetic mutation, identical twins from an egg and sperm which began as male (XY) can develop into a male / female pair.”
Twins Research Australia
Can male/female twins ever be identical?
me: yeah, X and Y chromosomes are not as locked to gender as we were led to believe in the last century.
Related to that is a wonderful special RadioLab (NPR) extended topic , “Gonads” ( “multi-episode journey deep into the parts of us that let us make more of us” )
She’s too young to date. That he looks like her has nothing to do with it. That’s all.
Lord F, I agree with you that it doesn’t seem to be heading for a separated-at-birth story. But that is not quite to say that their similarity of looks “has nothing to do with it”. It’s that similarity — of looks and of circumstance — that is making them pay attention to each other and begin to take some mutual interest.
Aah, puppy love. I find it charming that the ordinarily cynical Cynthia has been disconcerted.
I think that Dave (@1) and Chak [@8] each have a piece of the answer, but the significance of “11” is an entirely different matter: Cynthia is dismayed in the final panel because she realizes that her potential love interest doesn’t show any signs of stereotypical masculinity; instead, he looks like a prepubescent (11 year old) girl.
How would you like it if some kid you just met told you your name was a stupid, trendy name?
(Says the guy who in school had numerous other boys in class with the same name as I).
Is Connor all that trendy in that age range? I don’t have a handle on what the in baby names are in the US.
I also got hung up on the fact that Cynthia doesn’t mean anything in Hindi. It’s Greek and means “from Mount Kynthos” which is on the island of Delos. It was an epithet of Artemis.
@ DemetriosX (11) – Information in the “SSA’s baby name database” shows that “Connor” was virtually unknown before 1980, but quickly climbed in popularity in the 1990s, consistently placing within the top-60 to top-40 from 1993 all the way to 2018. Its highest popularity (#38) was in 2004 (over 10000 baby boys were named “Connor” in that year). The name has recently declined in popularity, falling to #118 in 2022.
Nobody seems to have mentioned that the two very similar-looking children also have identical-looking robotic dogs.
Grawlix – My name – Meryl – wasn’t common when I was young (and is not much more common now).
When – for example – the big thing at school was a name pin that “everyone” was getting, it did not come in “Meryl”. When the teacher said “Meryl” it meant me – not another Meryl – except – one year there were 4 Meryl/Merrill/Merrel’s in my class. I swear to this day it was a joke by the school staff. We had two girls named Meryl and two boys – with the other Merrill names.
Then I ran into a problem as sometimes it was not noted by a teacher that Meryl is a girl’s name and Merrill is the usual boys version. One class the teacher sat us boy/girl – I was put between two girls. That led to my appending my middle name to be part of my first name. (While no one was still calling me by the double name by the time I was in my late 20s – my mother-in-law did – always.)
Someone will say something to me as it being a such an unusual name and how nice that is – I will sort of uh huh while if Robert is with me, he will actually say that I don’t really like it.
Then again my sisters tended to just call me “Meh”.
One advantage to reenacting is I got to pick my name. So I am Anne, not Meryl. (“Anne with an E. My father always said – if it is good enough for a Queen to have an e at the end, it is good enough for my daughter.”) I have presumed that Meryl did not exist as a name in the eighteenth century.
(Many to most reenactors tend to pick a name more common to the period or for other reasons than their own to use – including not wanting everyone at an event knowing one’s complete name. My husband Robert uses Alex as his name for reenacting.)
@ Meryl – The Baby Name website that I linked (@12) is down for maintenance, but if you check it later, you can compare the gender frquencies for the various forms of “Meryl”. Among the (approximately) four million American children born each year, there are always a certain percentage who get their names from orthographically challenged (or intentionally iconoclastic) parents. Even with such well-established forms such as Francis/Frances, there ar always a few people who do not know (or choose to ignore) the traditional rules.
BillR at 4 said “
I predict, if this arc continues at all, that Cynthia’s grandpa and Connor’s grandma will meet, and possibly continue meeting. Some sort of synchronicity with the four of them will ensue.”Well now we have this:
And continuing …