Phoebe and Her Unicorn by Dana Simpson for June 20, 2014

Not to mention the plural of a computer mouse.

You must know the Olsen twins’ song “One Buffalo, Two Buffali.” If not, then look for it on YouTube.

Two Jacki….

Not to mention Man’s laughter.

Why does a shipment go by car and a cargo go by ship?

Why does ‘cave’, ‘Dave’, ‘gave’, ‘save’, and ‘wave’ all rhyme but ‘have’ does not?

Why do we park on driveways and drive on parkways?

If ‘brethren’ is another word for brothers, why isn’t ‘sistren’ another word for sisters?

Summer is for riding, not asking silly questions.

I’m still trying to understand why we call daughters “Daw-ters” and not “Daff-ters”.

Why is Madison Square Garden round?

As the George Carlin auditions continue….

When my niece was 2 she got a cut and learned what blood was. For a while afterward, she was convinced that in the present tense you were blooding and in the past tense, you blooded.

Agreed Phoebe.

The actual reason is that in Old English and Middle English, the words “laugh” and “cough” were quite different; they wore down to resemble each other in Modern English, but “laugh” had already given birth to “laughter”.

Same basic idea for the “daughter” question. This is why God gave us the Oxford English Dictionary; all other dictionaries are kiddy toys.

As to Madison Square Garden, you’re parsing it wrong. The current building is the latest of a series of buildings by that name in New York, and the original one was located on—ta-da!—Madison Square. So it’s “the garden that is [or used to be] on Madison Square”, not “the square garden named ‘Madison’”.

Welllll, we’ve got an OED , and net links to The Lexicon on every floor my bldg. It’s saved my behind many a time.

Feel the need to do a meme with that close-up in the third panel.

Why isn’t “slaugh” the verb form of “slaughter”?

One tooth.Two teeth.

One telephone booth.Two telephone beeth?

I still wanna know why Theatre in the round is performed in a rectangular room

“Antique” and “barbeque” are two I find rather annoying. You can see why English is considered to be a difficult-to-learn language. There seem to be more exceptions than rules!

If all of the respondents to this strip breathe a very deep breath also known as a sigh, could the sound we (imagine we) hear be called sighter? (Not to be confused with the person fixing his/her gaze on a distant object).

….and is one of my favorite pursuits. If knowledge is power, and if words have power, then the knowledge of words and how to use them is invaluable!

Answer: Because “laugh” entered the English language from German, while “cough” entered the language from Dutch. Two different origins, and two different resulting conjugations of the word after it passed through Old English.

Johnson’s dictionary was a good beginning, and the best available at the time, but it’s been out of date, both in terms of its learning and in terms of its subject matter, since Jane Austen’s day. Here’s a riddle for you: how is the spelling of the word “knight” related to the spelling of the Scottish name “Culzean”?

@ Mochipants: Heh! I see what you did there!

“So just your parents, then” brought on a laughing fit.