Barney & Clyde by Gene Weingarten; Dan Weingarten & David Clark for August 30, 2023

This cartoon struck out.

T̶h̶a̶t̶’̶l̶l̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶d̶a̶y̶!̶

Techies used strikethroughs to replace a word or phrase with a more PC one while still letting you know what was meant whilst confusing the -idiots- noobs.

Yeah. Strikethroughs. My old boss insisted on strikethroughs and CAPs for new language from his assistants on any documents we were recommending for revisions. All revised documents needed his approval. It made sense to me. He wanted to see the the changes without having to go back and forth between the current and newly recommended revised documents.

Fast forward 20 years and I am the boss. I continued the same practice. When I received the marked-up documents, sent them out to some selected staff to give me feedback. Many were in the 20s. Almost every person gave me feedback that they could not comprehend the drafted document and asked me to take out the edits and send them clean ones. I replied that perhaps this new skill would benefit them and told them no.

I have since retired, but keep in contact with my replacement. During one of our conversations, he told me that they no longer use marked up paper documents. They use Word edit tools which puts proposed new language it red, and still uses strikethroughs. That’s better I guess.

There’s an alternative^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H variant.

This cartoon took no longer than usual for me to read.

The problem here is that strikethroughs are being used in a way that doesn’t make any sense, and therefore isn’t funny. You don’t cross out everything. It would have been more effective to write dialog that included strikethroughs to show the editing or censoring process in a humorous way.