Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for December 10, 2019

Somebody has to teach Pig how to use a dictionary.

And the “nabbers” finally paid the family to take the person back.

{groan}

No, Rat. It’s called abducted.

English…the language misspoken around the world more than any other.

Didn’t get back on ’til almost turnover but left responses to some of the comments. These humongous disaster events touch a lot of raw nerves. CO2 in the air is good, if only there were more rain forest acreage to “soak it all up”.

Anyone else, I would say he was being sarcastic.

I wonder what Pig wound say about Captain Kidd … I mean Captain Mann

Is a lady-killer a lady who kills, or someone who kills ladies?

Originally, “kidnapped” only described taking kids, while the word “abducted” described taking adults. Not sure when we went off the rails with that, but I agree it doesn’t make much sense.

He got yoinked!

Some one once said English was really three smaller languages sitting on each other’s shoulders and wearing a big coat.

Pig tis what happens when your relatives go to the Bacon factory ;-) … Croc Power !

In the words of H. Beam Piper:

“English is the result of Norman men-at-arms trying to chat up Saxon barmaids.”

In the words of James Nichols:

“English follows other languages into dark alleys, knocks them on the head, and goes through their pockets for loose vocabulary.”

Seriously, English is, at its base, the language of the Germanic tribes of the Angles and Saxons which conquered the southern two thirds of the island of Great Britain after the Romans departed. The Romans had conquered roughly the same area from the Britonic Celts, cousins to the Gauls on the mainland, and had pretty much stamped out Celtic languages in their area, except for a few wild mountain men in the west and some extremely stubborn inhabitants of marsh and moor in the south west. The Romans built two walls to keep the northern Celts out, and maintained a fleet to keep the Celts from the big island over to the west out. The Angles and Saxons languages gradually became one, flavored with some Celtic. More Germanic tribes, northern Germanic Danes and Norwegians and some Swedes rather than the central Germanic Angles and Saxons, grabbed parts of Britain, and added their varieties of German. Other Norwegians and Danes grabbed parts of the European mainland near Britain, particularly parts occupied by another bunch of central Germans, the Franks, whose language was heavily contaminated by Latin courtesy of the Romans and by local Celtic from the Gauls. Some of those would come across the sea to Britain in 1066. English is a mish-mash of Latin, multiple varieties of Celtic, and multiple types of German. Perhaps people should not expect consistency out of that.

Note: the walls to the north didn’t work. Walls are ineffective as tools for stopping illegal immigration, a fact known even to the Romans… And, come to think of it, the Chinese.

And, oh, ‘kidnap’ was originally ‘kidnab’, and first came to English in the mid to late 17th century. It meant, then, the abduction of children for sale as ‘indentured servants’ in the French and English, not yet British until the Acts of Union in the first decade of the 18th century, colonies in North America and the Caribbean.

If someone takes one of Goat’s young relatives, that individual would indeed be kidnapped.

PIG needs a ((((((((HUG! ))))))))

Was expecting Stephan getting clubbed or clobbered by someone in the last panel.

Fue secuestrado has a much clearer meaning.

Just go with it. If you think too much about the English language, it will break your brain.

Was this mansplaind or ratsplained.

Boring

Man-nabbed? Not bad.

I did this once. Got invited to a friends for dinner. Another couple there brought their 2 YO son, but he was sleeping in another room. Went into the other room, saw the 2YO, and hollered “IT’S A KIDNAPPING”.

Pig likely wrote the code to the computer in Computers Don’t Argue [guy has a late library book, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, computer thinks he actually kidnapped somebody, long story short he is executed for a crime he didn’t commit]

Do a search for “kidnap etomology,” or go to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) online.

He wasn’t kidnapped. He was taken into protective custody by the MIB.

The original term was “man-grabbing,” but it sounded too much like someone was having fun, so it was changed to “kidnapping.”

Pearls is my favorite, never heard of Foxtrot.?

Both are great! It is not an either-or situation!

Yeah, as a kid and teenager I never really got the whole kidnapping thing when it was adults who were taken. Never understood why it was kidnapping instead of adultnapping. Somehowing I got the suffix -napping meant taking someone against their will but I thought the prefix oughta refer to whether they were a kid or an adult.

Sounds like a case of assault.

Foxtrotfanofficial.. Is that you Pastis??

English is a language that no real pig speaks, Pig. So I sorta understand your problem, except that you’re a cartoon-pig and do speak a simple form of Basic English (with its 800-word vocabulary)….