January 9, 2006

Today’s classic A&J is from 2006. I noticed there were a couple of recent comments about the above strip on the GoComics site, comments left by visitors who followed a link from here. They were discussing whether the grammatically awkward “might could” is a regionalism. I like to think I’m a fair-to-middlin’ grammarian, but I do traffic primarily in conversational dialog. When a choice arises, I have to remind myself to have the characters talk as real people talk, not as they were taught to talk in the fifth grade. I do try to avoid regional dialect and local nomenclature, for obvious reasons. Did I slip up here? All I will say is, Mayhaps. I said I would tell you a squirrel story related to the current A&J comic strips, but I’m short of time today. We’ll get to that tomorrow, when Arlo and Janis will still be without electricity.