Cul de Sac by Richard Thompson for March 14, 2014

Madeline, did you forget that 4 year olds are so literal?

That moment when you realize you just planted an idea in your child’s head.

That which you have said to a four-year old, you cannot unsay. Sorry, Madeline. Time to give some compensatory attention to your eight-year-old son, who already has too many neuroses….

That’s what I said when the arc began.

Languages generally evolve toward regularity, so it’s odd that ‘sneaked’ is increasingly being replaced with ‘snuck’.

I still laugh when my brother said , “I heard footprints outside my window last night”

I had the very bad judgment to read “Nasty School” by Shel Silverstein to my “Alice” grandchild a few years ago. I voiced some mild disclaimers, like “Don’t try this at home, kid.” But first news I knew, she had taken a magic marker and drawn a face on the living-room carpet. I knew better, but did it anyway. So did she.

“Oh have you heard of nasty school?They teach nasty things and they have nasty rules.They only take nasties and rowdies and fools,So come, let’s take a walk through nasty school.” (Etc.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/books/review/nasty-school-and-other-poems-by-shel-silverstein.html?_r=0

Pschearer, this time is the force of analogy.

Or, maybe is the fact that sneaked is really hard to pronounce?

My younger brother and I were playing once, and he said, “You can’t catch me because I’m a sneak!” So I quickly caught him and said, “Ha, I caught the sneak” and he said, “I wasn’t sneaking then!”

That blank, spaced-out look on Madeline’s face in panel three borders on the creepy.

Absorbine Jr. does still exist, as I saw from looking it up online. Also, “snuck” is considered by most dictionaries (at least that I looked up) as an acceptable variant of “sneaked.”

NICE SAVE, MADELINE, NICE SAVE!