Lesson 9

now this brings back childhood memories, don't it? when I was growing up, we had a neighbor kid who was about half my age and every now and then his parents would let him come over to stay busy while they were cleaning or boning and whatnot. they had quite a bit of a different upbringing from us so we weren't really all that careful with the way we spoke around the kid and every now and then his folks would be a little miffed about it.

normally, when your kid learns a new word while visiting a friend, they learn it from the the humans in the household. in this case, it's from the pets. moreover, the bird saying this didn't learn it from repeating the words of the nutmegs. this is pure bird on cat verbal violence.

the kid isn't learning a bad word from the video game he's playing with Iggy, he's not learning it from Iggy, he's not learning it from Iggy's grandparents, he's learning it from something more primal: the alarm call of a bird perceiving one of its predators. that's sort of touches on the source of foul language in a way. it's taking a lot of restraint to not make the obvious pun joke here.

very frequently harsh language emerges from us whenever we perceive some sort of danger, whether it is something scary approaching or pain from a sudden injury. it would be easier to just release it as random sounds from the body but once we have a grasp on language, we almost all universally translate the feelings of fear and pain into words. and those words are often considered crude.

it is a similar effect that we see here with the grawlix substitution. we know that the bird is cursing because we're familiar with the symbols of curse words being censored in comic strips. also that the visiting friend is making note of it in this way.

we have the very complex human interaction of someone going to someone else's house and learning a naughty word while there with the recognition that his family is much more repressed in terms of the language they are allowed to use. we have the more simple situation of a bird giving out an alert call. and we have the comic strip convention itself which might be the most complex because it requires decades and decades and decades of cultural context around the construction of comics (though there are millions of years behind the evolution of animal warning cries so who can really say)

gallagher, you've done it again