5316: Ask an internet question...
| Ask an internet question... |
 Made by: Linguanaut |
Explanation[edit | edit source]
 |
This comic is unexplained. If you can edit this page to provide an explanation, please do! |
The author writes:[edit | edit source]
This is a very quickly and sloppily put-together strip, but I'm tired right now so that's as good as it's going to be. Lyman's response here is supposed to be absurd, but the joke isn't meant to be about his pronunciation* so much as it is about the nature of the argument (and the discussion which surrounds it) in the first place. Essentially - each letter in 'gif' can, in other contexts, represent the phonemes Lyman is using - so it's like the old 'ghoti' for 'fish' gag, just extended to a slightly greater degree of absurdity and brought up-to-date for the age of the IPA and the internet.
If you're not familiar with the idiom, 'Ask a [x] question, get a [x] answer', that's what the title is about. An 'internet' question would elicit an equally 'internet' answer, and that's (supposed to be) what's on display here. Questions and answers on the internet being famously relevant, reasonable, and helpful. Of course.**
And that is today's essay-length*** explanation of a joke edit of a newspaper comic strip
*I feel like I had to explain that, because otherwise someone with a very specific level of knowledge of phonetics might***** come along and read the strip as meaning 'haha, that man talks strangely, which is funny to me, specifically because I am a bad person who is only amused by making fun of others', and that's not what it's supposed to be. Lyman is doing something I do, often, to amuse myself, and that is finding ways to deliberately mispronounce words while still technically reading what's been written.
**sarcasm
***hyperbole
****There is no fourth footnote reference, and yet here's a fourth footnote! How did that happen?
*****Read: will, definitely, because this is the internet and that's just what people do here
Original Square Root of Minus Garfield strip: 2023-05-17.
Original strips: 1981-01-03, 1981-01-08.
Transcript[edit | edit source]
{Jon is standing in front of a green background, holding a hastily-edited white rectangle bearing the inscription 'GIF'}
Jon: Okay, how do I say this?
{Odie, Lyman, and Garfield are standing in a row on a weird lavender field, with Garfield having a slight pink aura because he has been pasted in from another source strip; they answer Jon in each panel, using IPA to indicate pronunciation, thus:}
Odie: gɪf {which for those of you who do not read IPA, can be rendered in conventional English spelling approximately 'Giff'}
Garfield: ʤɪf {which is approximately 'Jiff'}
Lyman: ɦɨ:ʍ {which is approximately 'Ghyywhf'}
{Jon is standing exactly where he was, only now his mouth is closed and his face is slightly scrunched, muppet-style, to indicate his disapproval and consternation}
Trivia[edit | edit source]
This strip's image initially accidentally overwrote that of the previous day's strip when it first debuted, internally coding itself to be that strip's image (using the filename 5315.png, intended for the previous day's strip, instead of the intended 5316.png); this situation has since been rectified.
