Frazz by Jef Mallett for September 14, 2018

Nailing down sure beats nailing up too.

Yes, Caulfield, you have an excellent point.

What’s up with Caulfield? He seems socially adept, but thinks extremely out of the box, and his mind seems to be everywhere except class.

Try screwing it down instead, and as Bilan said, don’t nail it up.

Nuance is everything and Caulfield is a master

Caulfield’s intellect may be hard to pin down, and his questions are sometimes tacky, but they’ve become a staple of this strip, and many readers find them fasten-ating.

I see stand-up in his future.

She now has him “pegged” as a smart-Alec…

As a wise man (Brother Dave Gardner) used to say, “It’s all in how you look at it and study it.”

I can identify with Caulfield.We moved a lot,so I would say silly stuff to try and make new friends.If I could make the teacher laugh,I new it was a good one.Yes I was a disruptor ;(

“Words with opposing meanings are also known as contronyms, autantonyms, antagonyms, or even Janus words (from the notoriously two-faced deity of Roman myth). For example, cleave can mean to split apart as well as to knit together, while quite can mean moderately as well as completely, and sanction can indicate allowing something as well as refusing to countenance it (the latter sense being clear in the Peace Pledge Union’s historic pledge: “I renounce war, and will never support or sanction another”).

“In his Spoonerisms, Sycophants, and Sops (1988), D. C. Black listed several other contronyms, such as scan, let, moot, wound up, and commencement. If you lease or rent a house, are you occupying it or letting someone else occupy it? If you trip, have you stumbled or are you walking gracefully? If you screen a film, you show it, but if you screen a garden shed, you hide it. If the stars are out, you can see them, but if lights are out, you cannot see them. Does literally mean precisely or is it being used merely for emphasis without being literally true (as in “They were literally killing themselves laffing”)?

“Phrases, too, can have opposite senses. First-degree murder is the most serious kind of slaughter, but first-degree burns are the least serious. The opposing senses of dispense with were presumably not noticed by the pharmacist who advertised that he “dispensed with accuracy”.

“Nowadays, if you say you are going to take care of somebody, it may suggest that you are going to kill them rather than care for them. The phrase waste no time can mean that you are eager to start something, but that was not the intention when someone (was it Disraeli?) wrote: “Thank you for your manuscript. I shall waste no time in reading it”. My favourite such phrase is with respect, which is often used in conversation or interviews to imply that the speaker has little or no respect for the person addressed!"

—Wordplay, by Tony Augarde

I’m amazed that nobody has said “The same reason we park on a driveway and drive on a parkway.”

I think it’s the same reason truthfulness is shooting straight (like a nail) and lying Is twisting the truth (like a screw)

Sure, like DEFCON 1 is very serious while DEFCON 5 is things are fine right now.

Caulfield asks a valid question that deals in word history and phases. Definitely not what the teacher has to cover in her syllabus. That’s for maybe HS. Though he may have researched it first so that she can parry her lunges, rhetorically.