In which I, personally, feel justified

[brigid]

12-20-2022

There are two things I want to talk about regarding this strip. The first is about narrative choices and the second is about me being a petty grammar stickler.

I'm going to do the petty one first.

"They're used only to replace omitted words."

While it's true that ellipses (the plural of ellipsis) are used to replace omitted words, they are also used to indicate a pause or hesitation. At this point that's probably how they're used the most. They're used in prose, they're used in dialog. McEldowney uses ellipses ALL THE TIME to indicate a pause or hesitation or a character trailing off.

Or at least I thought that he did.

It's one of the things that absolutely legitimately enrages me about his strip, actually. His characters bang on, albeit not as much as they used to, about proper grammar and split infinitives and blah blah blah bullshit and they use huge words in ways that don't quite work and feel very aggressively like they're words he uses because he found them in a thesaurus while looking up other words and he wants to sound smart. His characters pause and hesitate and take a moment to think and where someone who's actually grammatically competent would use an ellipsis (three periods, like "...") he'll use ten periods. Or twenty. Possibly more. He'll have several lines of periods as opposed to just indicating passage of time by splitting the speech bubble in two.

It drives me fucking bonkers.

There are very simple, very explicit rules about using an ellipsis. It's not like a split infinitive where the concept only exists because some self-important group of dorks wanted to firmly establish that THEY were SMART and EDUCATED unlike all those RUBES OVER THERE and therefore English (which is not a Romance language) should follow the same grammar rules as Latin (a Romance language) and invented the concept of split infinitives, labeling a way people have been speaking the language for thousands of years as wrong. This dude manages to memorize all these petty rules and regularly have strips where he makes fun of people who don't know these rules, make fun of people for speaking naturally, but he apparently doesn't know how to use an ellipsis.

So all these decades I've been very literally enraged by misuse of ellipses, because I'm an uptight obsessive dork about some things, it's not that he was using ellipses wrong purposely. It was because he, somehow, didn't KNOW.

An ellipsis consists of 3 periods, like so: "...". If you use an ellipsis at the end of a sentence, whether to indicate someone has trailed off or whether to replace words you punctuate it like so: "... ."

You do not use more than 3 periods to indicate a pause or hesitation, although you may choose to stylistically if you like. Some people do, in some contexts. It won't be grammatically accurate, so don't do it in formal writing, but if you want to make a point on tumblr or something GO FOR IT, writing is all vibes when you get down to it.

But this lemon faced motherfucker so quick to scold other people about grammar doesn't know how to properly use an ellipsis.

Typical.

In less petty complaining, I want to point out that it's December 20th. Christmas is on the 25th. Amos has twin daughters who are small children. Instead of spending these past few days leading up to Christmas showing him interacting with his children in any sort of Christmas, or winter, way (other than watching him make out with their mom on a swingset under some mistletoe) we see him with a talking cat (??) discussing prose-writing and dirty words or whatever. What, and I mean this very clearly and emphatically, the fuck.

Here is a partial and incomplete list of things we could be seeing this month:

• Edda and/or Amos decorating the house with their children


• Edda and/or Amos setting up and decorating the Christmas tree with their children


• A trip to Santa Claus, and photographs with same


• Amos wrapping presents for Edda with the girls, and Edda wrapping presents for Amos with the girls


• Edda and Amos taking the girls to see Juliette and Elliott, possibly while Edda and Amos shop or wrap presents or whatever.


• Juliette and/or gran spoiling the girls with a million presents


• Seth ditto


• Kiesel (their Nazi great-grandfather) interacting with the girls at all


• Any Austrian Christmas traditions Gran grew up with


• Adults making Christmas cookies with the girls


• Gingerbread houses


• The girls taking in Christmas Displays - lit up houses, if out in the suburbs, or heavily decorated storefront tableaux if they are in or near the city


• Reading "the night before Christmas" or "a Christmas carol"


• The girls discussing whether or not Santa is real (Amos was a devout believer until he was 12 or 13)


• Christmas caroling


• A viewing of The Nutcracker, possibly with commentary pithy, scathing, or otherwise by Edda and/or Amos


• Edda continuing any kind of Christmas/winter tradition from her childhood with her kids... Rankin and Bass movies, Peanuts Christmas, peppermint hot cocoa, open faced peanut butter sandwiches that look like Rudolph, hanging a special ornament, etc.


• Literally anything with Amos' family, anything at all

Instead this month we had 5 days of small-child-pregnancy-talk-flashback (including 2 Sunday strips), a completely unrelated child in an audience, 3 days of swingset-and-mistletoe, 5 days of other characters and mistletoe, a completely random strip with Sister Steven and Cardinal Feeney, Amos humping his cello on a swing, and 2 days of Amos and a talking cat discussing ribald wordplay and grammar. So far this month we have seen Amos and Edda's children once, and we have seen a completely unrelated child once. McEldowney could have had the kid with the food-smeared face in the audience watching the master cellist be Amos' own kids, but instead it was... some random kid.

McEldowney has spent five times as many strips depicting Edda and Amos, as children, discuss having a baby as he has spent depicting their actual real physical existing children. He's spent very little time on the actual children compared to how much time he spent on them as fetuses, and at this point I want to say he's spent more time showing child Edda and child Amos discuss conception (ugh) than he's spent showing the kids existing. But I haven't, like, gone through the archives and counted it up. It just FEELS that way. Just an endless morass of small children endlessly discussing conceiving and bearing children, and grammar that may or may not be correct.

The hyper-focus on potential babies, on hypothetical babies, on conception, while avoiding the real children that are alive is so very much a "pro-life" ("forced birth") stance. Edda and Amos haven't taught their children to walk, talk, feed themselves, read, any of that. They just kind of exist on the sidelines, sometimes providing commentary on the adults around them having sex.

You know.

Just normal things.