Frazz by Jef Mallett for February 27, 2024

Amazing Moment?

The R is not superfluous. Feb roo air eee, not Feb yew air eee.

What kind of speech impediment has trouble with ’R’s? Being from Boston?

They should have waited two days and run this strip on Wedunsday

Calm down, Frazz. February has the extra day only almost every four years.

It looks like Frazz made up for the R by skipping an F in the last frame.

But what do you expect from a guy name Jef?

I think Frazz is right. On those other 3 years, use the extra Rs for “talk like a Pirate” day.

I pronounce “Wednesday” as “Wed-nez-day.” I also pronounce “Information” as “inform-ay-tie-on” just to annoy my students. It only annoys my high-achieving students, however. The others have their earbuds in.

It’s kind of cute that she remembers that about him!

Feb-bree

Isn’t there an “IF” missing in the last speech bubble?

When doc set my next appointment for 2-29, I asked if that meant 4 years until the next one. The way he looked at me, I was glad we had already had the needle stick.

Hey, Frazz, don’t go nuculer over a mispelled werd or too.

It is funny, sometimes, watching people go absolutely ballistic over rules in such a trash language as English. You want me to take seriously a language with the word “island”? What’s that “s” in there for, decoration?

Chemist walks into a bar and asks for this iron beer he’s been hearing about. Bartender says he’s never heard of it. “Are you sure?” asks the chemist. “They keep talking on the evening news all the time about Fe Brewery.”

Leap Year Trivia: It is not a Leap Year in the Gregorian calendar if the year is evenly divisible by one hundred. However, if it is even divisible by four hundred, then it is a leap year.

That would make too much srense.

Arika Okrent:

In the United States, the most common pronunciation is feb-yoo-air-ee. Both Merriam-Webster and American Heritage dictionaries consider the common pronunciation correct, along with the less common, more traditional standard feb-roo-air-ee.

This gets fans of the traditional standard all worked up. But the loss of the first r in February is not some recent habit propagated by lazy teenagers. People have been avoiding that r for at least the last 150 years, and probably longer than that. Given certain conditions having to do with word stress and the other sounds in a word, we simply do not like to have two r’s so close to each other. The name for the linguistic process where one sound drops out because another of the same sound is too close to it is dissimilation, and it affects lots of languages.

Consider your pronunciation of the following words, and be honest about whether you really say the r’s in parentheses: su®prise, gove®nor, pa®ticular, be®serk, paraphe®nalia, cate®pillar, southe®ner, entrep®eneur, p®erogative, interp®etation. Not everybody drops these r’s, but at the same time, nobody seems to get too upset when they hear others do it.

Forget FebRuary! What about WeDnEsday?

I grew up in a small town in West Virginia and that’s the way we talked. Worshington,Libery,Yella,Winda,Wensday,Febuary

Also, years that end in 00 are only leap years if divisible by 400 (so 1900 wasn’t and 2100, 2200 and 2300 won’t be). The reason is that the extra length of the revolution year compared to the calendar is not 1/4, but 97/400.

Now Frazz isn’t making any sense. You can’t just say there’s a connection when there isn’t one.

I wouldn’t mind if all R’s just got up and walked away.

Listen. It bothers me that so many people lately pronounce the t. I learned when I was young, and my Merriam-Webster confirms that the t is silent, and it is pronounced “lissen”. It is as if these people have never heard about a silent letter.