Just a pinch of trouble
Reference on “Everything is Spiders”
↓ Transcript
Todd: Good afternoon, sweetie. How was school today?
Selkie: Friggen awful.
Selkie: It was ones of those days, where everythings starts off wonderful, then it turns wierd...
Selkie: Ands then everything is spiders.
Todd: I've heard this pattern before. You didn't meddle in other people's business again, did you?
Selkie: Yes, buts its was an ACCIDENTAL meddle.
Todd: Nei Li Selkie Smith...
Selkie: A small meddle! The tiniest of meddles!
Selkie: Friggen awful.
Selkie: It was ones of those days, where everythings starts off wonderful, then it turns wierd...
Selkie: Ands then everything is spiders.
Todd: I've heard this pattern before. You didn't meddle in other people's business again, did you?
Selkie: Yes, buts its was an ACCIDENTAL meddle.
Todd: Nei Li Selkie Smith...
Selkie: A small meddle! The tiniest of meddles!
"smol meddle" was my placeholder text while fussing with text bubble layouts.
I love that full name use.
That’s how she knows she’s in TROUBLES…
Ok I LOVE how he’s using her full ACTUAL name.
Now I have to wonder — have Todd, Selkie, and any relevant Sarnothi agreed on how her birth name is written in our alphabet? (Recall that Selkie herself wasn’t sure about that, a while back — “Neigh Lee” reference.)
I love the idea of “everything is spiders”.
To be fair, she didn’t meddle, just brought to the attention of the others how they were making their friends feel, I think a little more explanation is needed lol.
I just love the full name use.
You know that rule they taught you in school? “I before E except after C”? Weird how it doesn’t always work…
It’s English, each rule generates enough exceptions that a new rule must be created, for the exceptions. … which need a new rule….
I before E, except after C or when sounded as A as in neighbor or weigh, or weekends or Holidays and all throughout May, and I’ll always be wrong no matter what I say. It’s a hard rule.
I believe that the ‘i before e, except after c’ rule actually has MORE EXCEPTIONS than actual occurrences.
When I was a kid I pointed out that “I” & “E” always came after “C”… In fact they come so far after “C” that “D” and “F,G,H” have room to get between them.
As a german, i hate that rule. It makes americans totally mangle a lot of german loan words or german-based names. “ei” is a totally valid combination of letters, but a lot of americans change it to ie at every chance, probably subconsciously, because they have been taught that stupid rule.
And then they continue to pronounce “ei” like “ie”. If you take a word from german, pronounce “ei” like “I” and “ie” like “ee”.
And i don’t even get why you would need that rule. You don’t have specific rules for all possible letter combinations, you just remember how words are spelled.
English is just German, only polluted with a bunch of nouns from other countries, … and some bon mots and turns of phrase we stole from the French. I weep that we cannot have pronunciation based spelling like the Allemanii and the Deutch.
I really hate to think how long we would have waited for Calculus to arrive had Sir Issac Newton been using Roman Numerals.
Why do we have that rule? Desperation, possibly. In addition to what Geneseepaws said, English has stolen words from many languages, sometimes changing them to match English words and sometimes leaving them unchanged (and sometimes some baffling combination of the two).
Even words from the same language can be inconsistent. For example, the words “though”, “through” and “thorough” all have the “-ough” part pronounced differently despite all coming from Proto-Germanic.
In short, it’s a mess and trying to figure out spelling from how it sounds (or vice versa) is a doomed endeavour, so people have (futilely) attempted to find patterns in the hope of not needing to memorise thousands of questionable spelling/pronounciation pairs.
Not to mention, there used to be a time where people didn’t have a standard spelling for words and plenty of people would write the same word with different spellings.
I love how in the selkieverse, school buses do not exist
I went to two schools in my childhood. One of them had a school bus, the other didn’t.
Admittedly, I’m Ukrainian, but still. Not everywhere has school buses.
Someone is in trouble.
the ONLY time they use the full name is when you are in trouble.
I love the “everything is spiders” reference. Just got Allie’s new book from B&N and it’s wonderful!