Yep, that’s what I thought she meant too! Did anyone here not think that first?
Such a nice use of expressive objects.
BTW, if you are looking for a great read, try The Wager. There’s also a long excerpt in The New Yorker a few months back.
Sunday Funnies – LOLs, December 10th, 2023
Comics I Don't Understand 
I have not been able to find any relevant references to a sailor named “John Forgione”, and I feel sorry for all those poor souls bearing the name, who are about to have their social media accounts dive bombed by zillions of curious comic readers.
P.S. My first thought was that the name might be associated with “John Franklin“, but after I looked them up I realized that I had mistakenly conflated the Schackleton and Franklin expeditions as being led by the same captain, which they definitely were not (the former got them all back alive, the latter left them all – himself included – dead and/or eaten).
P.P.S. The editorial comment probably refers to the book by David Grann, but the Wikipedia article about the Wager mutiny is interesting, too, and not nearly as long.
P.P.P.S. Anderson overlooked that the play diagram will also work perfectly against German defenders.
Wow, karma — I started The Wager last night; when I read the mention here, I was confused, context error! Seems great so far.
It’s possible John Forgione is just a friend of Jef Mallett’s.
IDU the Andertoons.
Instead of Xs and Os, it’s Xs and Ös. The latter is common to many Germanic alphabets, although the internet informs that unlike many other languages, in Swedish it’s a distinct letter rather than an accented O.
@ Brian (5) – From an English perspective, the German Umlauts are sometimes considered to be modifications just like the áccénted vowels in Spanish (and the word is sometimes taken to mean the twö döts above the normal letter), but within the context of native German orthography, the Umlauts are considered to be separate, independent letters, although there is often a relationship in the scope of conjugation and declination.
And those who go in for correcting people’s terminology may enjoy pointing out that it is not really a case of umlaut when the pair of dots are used over a vowel (usually one of a doublet) in English words to indicate that the vowels each get a speech segment. As in reëvaluate, coöperate, the names Zöe and Chlöe maybe, and so on. I’ve seen that called a dieresis, but am not sure if only that use is labelled thus or it is wider. (So, if dieresis were the name of the pair of dots as a symbol, we would have the question of whether a dieresis on a letter [symbol] could be said to signal an umlaut [sound change]!)
No, I definitely didn’t think that – the ice cream was clearly a bribe so that he wouldn’t mention her road rage. I don’t know if Zack actually thought so or just saw a loophole…he varies from day to day on being kid-dumb, really dumb, and very clever (not smart, so much, just clever).
If a German is reciting the alphabet, is the Ö one of them? What I read indicated that it’s not, but is in Swedish, but oddly the internet has been known to be wrong on occasion.
When we sang the alphabet in German class, it was just the unaccented characters. Neither umlauts or eszetts were considered separate letters. Different places/contexts have different ways to sort them though.
I tend to think about umlauts and dieresis as two separate symbols that just happen to look the same.
The dotted Os are very common in Swedish. Show up in a lot of surnames.
If you read the word “so” as ” and therefore” – its normal meaning – you get, “I bought you ice cream, and therefore please don’t say anything to the boarders.” Then it should be clear that she isn’t referring to the ice cream primarily.
You guys make a convincing case!
@ Brian (9) – The Umlauts (ä, ö, & ü) are not recited† by German school children, but they are included (along with “ß”) in every elementary school diagram of all the letters, and are treated as separate “units” when first graders are taught the alphabet (“Ä” is for “Äpfel”, etc.) They also have separate keys on typewriter keyboards, rather than a single diacritical “accent” key.
P.S. @ Darren (10) – The “ ¨ ” symbols are indeed different. The “Umlaut” symbol was originally a superposed, miniature lowercase “e” (and can sometimes be seen in this form on old gravestones). In the antique German handwritten script, the “e” was a pair of little slashes, similar to a compressed script “u”, those two little slashes were (later) simplified to the typographical dots used today. Nevertheless, German children are still taught to make (and call) those marks “little strokes”, and not “dots”. This is partly because German kids are taught to use fountain pens (right from the beginning, in first grade), and small strokes are more reliable than dots when writing with fountain pens.
P.P.S. † – There’s no equivalent to the “alphabet song” in German; the first 22 letters can be fit to the English tune, but the last four letters don’t work at all (if you compare the American rhythm of “double-you, eks, why, zee” to the German “veh, iks, üpsilon, zett”, you can see why).
Are the circles in the game Tic Tac Toe O’s or 0’s? :-)
Your discussion of symbols combined with my musings on the T-T-T game reminded me of the “slashed zero” which is often used to distinguish itself from the letter “O”. According to Wikipedia, it can sometimes be confused with other symbols. That’s not very helpful. :-)
@ Grawlix – For tic-tac-toe I would normally say “eks & oh” (never “zero”), but some Germans think of the symbols as “cross & circle”. On the other hand, the popular model train scale known as “HO” (“aitch-oh”) in English is always called “H0” (“hah-null” = “H-zero”) in German.
P.S. Putting a slash through the circle is an easy way to distinguish between “O” and “0”, but there hasn’t always been a uniform agreement about which character to slash. When I first learned Fortran, we were taught that the “standard” for our code sheets was to slash the ohs (possibly because letters were less common than numbers in programming way back then), but even the earliest video screen fonts did it the other way, putting the slash on the zeros, and that has become the modern default.
P.P.S. When writing by hand, Germans slash every “7” and every (printed) “Z”, to distinguish them from “1” and “2”, respectively.
Occasionally one would see zeroes with a dot in the middle to distinguish from O. It doesn’t seem to be a separate character, just a display choice, but here’s a Wikpedia image:
Seems like Anderson was on a streak of thinking about football play diagrams.
My first thought WAS that Zach;s mom meant for him not to tell the boarders that she lost her temper with him.
Meryl, to me it looked more like she was losing her temper in Zack’s presence, but against other drivers, not him.
Thank you Mitch4 – I guess I misread it originally!