Frazz by Jef Mallett for November 15, 2017

After 40 years or so of teaching Second Grade she has learned a few things, especially when she has had Frazz and similar people for students.

“Wurlitzer” has more letters than “brain.” For that matter, so does “Farfisa.”

A bit hard to stomach.

Science humor, har, har, har.

So it wasn’t just a gut response.

Stumped, as usual. What organ is he talking about?

Not to be a stickler here (Caulfield started it) but isn’t a single molecule of salt also a compound?

And why is “abbreviation” such a long word……

LOVE Mrs. Olsen!

Maybe cerebrum, the Latin word for brain?

Does Pastis of PBS know about this?

Words that get used a whole lot get shortened over time. And if there’s more than 1 word that means the same thing, the shorter one tends to drive out the longer one, simply because it’s easier to say.

In Robert J. Sawyer’s Parallax Trilogy, the Neanderthal civilization of a parallel Earth had recently had a horrible conflict that had resulted in a catastrophic 83 deaths. They referred to that awful event by a very long word and, among themselves, expressed concern that humans used such a short word (“war”) for their own conflicts, implying that they were more frequent (possibly as often as every century) and might have resulted in hundreds, maybe even thousands, of deaths.

What’s the difference between a seal and a sealion?

One electron.

How can you tell the difference between a chemist and a miner?

By the way they pronounce “unionized”

Come on, people.

COMPOUND is a longer word than

MOLECULE

Doesn’t anyone here know how to count?

When does she introduce the 4 types of chemical bonds? For those of you who have forgotten they are Covalent, Ionic, Metallic and James.

“Even”? Five isn’t many.

How about “world wide web” having an abbreviation (“double-u double-u double-u”) that takes longer to say than what it supposedly shortens? (I will never in my life use “dub-dub-dub”.)