Comic for Friday, Jul 10, 2026

[Amiable Dorsai 74]

Vows are so inconvenient.  So Blade Maid is stymied, at least for the moment. Does Elliot know about the maid summons? Will he just destroy the thing, knowing it has no real consciousness? Or at least distract it enough for Grace to administer the coup de gras?  Tune in Monday, same Bat time, same Bat channel...

[Pharaoh RutinTutin 1,671]

 

Maybe psychological warfare?

"I must not hurt you.  Please leave." 

"But hurting my friends hurts.me.  If you don't stop, I will fight you." 

How deep does this whirlpool spin? 

 - - - - - 

And wouldn't she deliver a coup de Grace? 

 

[Don Edwards 583]

And if she uses a lawnmower as a weapon, would it be a coup de grass?

[mlooney 3,838]

7 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

And wouldn't she deliver a coup de Grace? 

 

6 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

And if she uses a lawnmower as a weapon, would it be a coup de grass?

\me OK, both of you get a star and a written note, in red ink, on  your pages.

[ijuin 611]

“Coup de grace” is the original spelling anyway.

[mlooney 3,838]

9 hours ago, ijuin said:

“Coup de grace” is the original spelling anyway.

Well, sort of.  In French, it's “coup de grâce.”  Note the hat on the A.

[Pharaoh RutinTutin 1,671]

 

Why doesn't English dress up our letters? 

Is marking characters that are pronounced or accented differently a way to clarify or complicate spelling? 

 

[Don Edwards 583]

There are variations in what the diacritics (the marks adorning letters) mean and how they originated. And a single mark can have different meanings in different languages, even those whose origins are geographically adjacent (such as French and German).

Spanish is one of the easiest languages to explain the diacritics of. A tilde over an N - ñ or Ñ - alters the pronunciation of that letter to be more like "ny". Other than that, it's about stress. A multi-syllable word without an accent mark is stressed on the next-to-last-syllable if it ends with a vowel, n, or s; on the last syllable otherwise. But if there's an accent mark, whatever syllable it's on is stressed.

French has perhaps the most useless of the still-used diacritics. Both the grave accent on an initial vowel and the circumflex basically mean "there used to be an S after this letter, but we dropped it somewhere around Middle French and couldn't find it again." Examples, ècureil, forêt. Put the S'es back in, and you can probably figure out the English translations. The acute accent almost always means even less; omitting it is a misspelling, not a different word, and it doesn't affect pronunciation.

On the other hand, the cedilla matters in French, as does the grave accent when further into the word. The cedilla goes under a C (French never uses it on any other letter) and looks kind of like a comma, i.e. Ç or ç, and means that the C makes the K sound when the ordinary rules of the language would assign an S sound. The grave accent occasionally affects meaning: des is "of the" or "some", while dès are rolled on the table in various games.

English? About the only diacritic you're at all likely to encounter in modern-English text, other than in fairly-recent "loan words" from other languages, is the diaeresis (which is also one of the more difficult ones to spell). It's a pair of dots over the second of two adjacent vowels, usually double vowels, to indicate that they are pronounced in separate syllables. Example: coöperate. But it's usually omitted, and sometimes replaced by a hyphen: co-operate.

Switch to some other language, and the above usage notes may or may not apply. And may apply differently: studying the default Compose-key configuration file reveals that some language(s) will put a diaeresis over some consonants, and some put a diaeresis under a letter. And there are other diacritics I'd never heard of, but are used somewhere for some purpose, such as macron (a short horizontal line above a letter). Plus languages that aren't satisfied with just one on a letter, but will apply two or three.

[mlooney 3,838]

Of course German and the Nordic languages use a lot more marks than the romance languages do.