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No. 65: A calque in the woods

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A calque in the woods

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Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/pomh/?comic=65

Strip by: Ian Boreham

{A linguistics student is walking on a track in the woods. A fox is walking in front of him, and another behind. The front one is labelled "prefox", and the one behind is labelled "suffox". A tree trunk is labelled "stem". The student is carrying a borrowed copy of The Plague, by Camus, labelled "loan translation". His phone is ringing in his back pocket. The ringing SFX is labelled "phoneme".}

title: Enrolled in the linguistics track

The author writes:

The idea of a prefox and a suffox came from a typo I made. The internet tells me that many other people have made this same typo, and many of them have not noticed.

I was going to call the strip "A calque in the Black Forest" as a tribute to The Goodies, but autosuggest tells me that "a walk in the woods" is much more topical than "a walk in the black forest". So, clearly that's the route towards getting the cool kids to read the comic. Of course, I mean the other cool kids who aren't already reading it.

(In case this is confusing, "calque" does not actually rhyme with "walk", and I am aware of this, but kind of wished that they did.)

The colouring in this strip was a bit of experiment. I thought it turned out OK.

Drawn in Krita and Inkscape.