Phoebe and Her Unicorn by Dana Simpson for May 17, 2012

I love the accents! :) And Phoebe’s so cute flipping her flipflops back and forth.

I think Phoebe didn’t take into account the envy factor

yes – the curlicues do make a difference. Remember the “purfuit of happineff.”

I’d love to hear how those fonts are pronounced.

Has anyone else noticed that Marigold is speaking those words in the same font as the banner?

In any event, school has the ability to make even the most transcendent of subjects boring.

Yeah, the banner font is “H. Nostralia” and the special word font is “Unicorna”.

I guess Phoebe understands now.

“The Shield of Boringness” should be said with the same flair as “The Pit of Despair” and “The Bog of Eternal Stench” and “The [insert object here] of Rassilon”.

No doubt the Shield of Boringness is a form of Weirdness Censor akin to the Somebody Else’s Problem Field.

“ſ” is the older form, going back to ancient Roman handwriting. Remember, the whole idea of uppercase and lowercase is relatively modern. The original Roman alphabet, was strictly uppercase. Lowercase was invented as a different way of writing. It was only in relatively recent times that the idea got around that it was cool to mix the two alphabets together, so that every letter comes in two flavors. It was only later still that printers started using “s” instead of “ſ”, first at the end of words, then throughout. (My old high-school German textbook still used long “ſ”, and even today, the special German letter “ß”, although it is now regarded as equivalent to “ss”, is actually “ſz”.) I am not sure why those old printers started using “s” instead of “ſ” at the ends of words, but it might be related to the fact that Greek uses “σ” inside of words and “ς” at the end. Hebrew also has special letters “ך“ ,”ם“ ,”ן“ ,”ף”, and “ץ” at the ends of words instead of “כ“ ,”מ“ ,”נ“ ,”פ”, and “צ”. (Arabic has four versions of every letter, for beginning, middle, end, and standalone.)

In the meantime, now that Dana’s got the Exposition section of this particular sonata out of the way, she’s getting down to Development. I eagerly await it.

@ John W Kennedy & Frank Hightower:

Moft interefting!

I was imagining Marigold repeating the title again (and I love her soft, kind expression in panel 4; such lovely eyes!) and all of a sudden . . .

All I could hear was: “Child, child, child…,” a-la Felix Unger.

Which lead to picturing Phoebe as Oscar. ::grins::

Well, Phoebe and Marigold would make the ultimate Odd Couple!

Congratulations; I think you have found the definition of the Shield of Boringness! :-)

Poor Phoebe ….popularity isn’t everything; if anything it’s a pain in the neck.

Get to the point, horseteeth.