I’m now second-guessing myself about how I say it. it’s like when someone asked me how I pronounce “banana”. as soon as I think about it, I don’t know the answer and I’m too aware of it to just accidentally say it naturally (however that is).
on the other hand, I am quite certain that potato and tomato do *not* rhyme. 🙂
Funny you mention “banana”. The US and UK pronounce that differently, too. Banahna (UK) vs banaena (US). My ex’s sister pronounced it wrong in front of their English mother, once, and she gave her a look that had his sister panicking to correct herself. “Banahna! I meant banahna!”
I have never understood that. Why would you pronounce the second “a” sound different than the first one? To be consistent, it should be pronounced bahnahna.
Yep, I’m American (New England) and I’ve never heard a banana pronounced any other way than Banahna. I didn’t even know there *was* another pronounciation.
In the US here – I’ve never even heard, let alone used banaena. If it’s in the U.S. it’s a regionalism, and given that I travel for work I’m pretty confident it’s not common in a decent area.
And South Africans, as evidenced with Trevor Noah when talking about an Egyptian zoo that had allegedly painted a donkey to resemble a Zeh-bra. He was quite adamant about it, too – it’s on YouTube for those curious.
South Africans do, too. At least one particular South African does. That one South African would be Trevor Noah.
“I hope I change one thing in your hearts forever, just one thing, and that is: That animal in the wild that looks like a horse, it has black and white stripes… do me a favor, from now on: it’s not ZEE-brah, it’s ZEB-rah. Just like it’s not DEE-brah, it’s DEB-rah. Same structure of word.
Plus you can not name them ’cause you do not have them.”
Yep, ‘zeh-bra’, ‘to-mah-to’, and ‘waw-ter’ for that matter. I nearly died of thirst on a United Airlines flight back to Oz, but was saved when a bilingual fellow passenger told the flight attendant that I wanted some ‘WAH-duh’.
“zed” is the original. Consider: in German, it’s “zett.” In Swedish, it’s “sata.” In Danish, “set.” In Greek, where the alphabet actually comes from, it is of course “zeta.” The only places that don’t use a hard consonant on the end are American English and Portuguese. Those Canadians who say “zee” only do so because of the dominance of American media in our culture.
I’d have spelt it “zeb-ra,” because that’s how the phonemes break down, but as others have mentioned it’s the more common pronunciation outside of North America.
It’s an acceptable alternative spelling in UK-English so long as we’re talking -ise/-ize words (in fact, the OED prefers -ize English so if style schemes call for Oxford zenglish then that’s what they mean). Analyse, catalyse, and other words taking -yse in UK-English always do so, but are spelled with a z in US-English.
I get to explain the difference reasonably regularly at work (“Regarding your comment on the proofs, please be aware that the copy editor has not introduced ‘loads of errors’ into your work. As explained in the journal’s style guide – – this journal uses [language scheme] meaning [set of words] are all correct. As a result, please be aware that we will not be changing these spellings back to those used under [original language scheme] as this would make your paper inconsistent with other articles published in this journal”).
You are aware that there is not one version of British slang. For a local, they can tell not only where you grew up by your use of slang, but what side of the street.
Penny knows, she was there when they had their session and Jason already admitted to it when she mentioned she got him fired to. That’s both a confession and someone who can identify the student.
Well, Penny likely suspects it was Sal, since that’s the case where he had an off-hours tutoring session. We don’t know if she identified her to their bosses, especially since she was just making it up when she made the accusation.
If Jason was a decent liar, he could still claim to have no idea who he was accused of banging, unless they gave him a name or at least description. At which point he could still claim it was just tutoring and try to persuade Sal to back him up.
Penny’s word isn’t good evidence, considering her situation. “She’s just trying to get back at me since she’s getting canned anyway.” If she didn’t identify Sal at first, but did once he admitted it to her, then she’s changing her story and that lessens her credibility. Beyond that, it seems like she still hasn’t identified her, so there’s still nothing to go on.
The problem is, as has been pointed out, that for some terrible fucking reason Jason fighting it would require bringing the alleged student with him to the hearing. Which, if they genuinely don’t know who it is because Penny didn’t give a name, means any student he brings gives some inherent credibility to the accusation. And is still a terrible idea for student safety in such cases, we cannot overstate what a terrible policy that is when the accusation is based on a nonspecific secondhand account that Penny didn’t even think was true and just made out of spite.
Like the fact that Jason IS guilty and feels guilt for it is contributing to his not fighting, but at the same time the oversight structure in place is so poorly thought out I don’t think he actually could win.
Also I don’t think Jason can lie very well anyway, which he would have to do to fight it. By omission, sure, but claiming he didn’t bring the student because there was none would be a straight falsehood. Dude can’t even keep composure during a normal tutoring session with Sal, who was actually trying to learn.
His chance to contest being fired is to show up at the hearing. The email specifies to bring the affected student. So either he gets Sal (or someone else) to lie for him, and a student showing up at all is implicit acknowledgement that something improper was observed… or he attends the hearing alone and claims that Penny’s report was baseless and spite-driven (true), and that there was no student and no appearance of impropriety, much less actual impropriety (very, very false.)
Again, he has to show up to contest it in person, and doing so requires some form of lying because he is guilty AND a no-win situation to begin with. And we’re talking about a man who can’t hide his contempt for a student long enough to have a bad tutoring session without making snide remarks about her intelligence, life choices, and taste in men. (Seriously Jason manages to fail even the lowest possible bars of working with students.)
Why would we not? I mean, it’s not like he somehow coerced Sal into boinking him, she complained about not getting any, then whipped her shirt off and said “you’ll do” before attacking him. While she would have liked to also get a better grade because of it, that wasn’t her intent, and he didn’t adjust her grade for it, he handed grading her off to somebody else.
Sometimes, there’s nothing dishonorable about lying, and this is one of those times. It’s completely appropriate.
Of course, he’s also a terrible teacher, but that’s got nothing to do with this issue.
First of all, he didn’t hand her grades off the first time, second of all Sal made it clear that grades were, in fact, her intent (Jason acknowledged it in slip shine but then played stupid when Sal confronted him later), and third of all it’s always inappropriate for a teacher to bang their student and he deserved to be fired for it even if it weren’t for grades and he always handed them off. Him lying is completely inappropriate.
Yeah, I am definitely glad he’s losing his job, it’s the most decent thing he’s done in pretty much the entire strip. BBCC has demonstrated why his actions were blatantly unethical and worth firing over, as I’ve said he was a terrible teacher from the start, and him fighting it* would leave him with basically no positive qualities whatsoever.
* With the Walky plot thread giving a potential thing that Jason returning would add drama to, I can see some series of events occurring that leads to him fighting it. But for him to do it and retain any decency, it would have to be on someone’s behalf other than his own – the ‘Sal’s name is in this and it might reach Linda’ scenario being the most likely.
That’s pretty much my stance – not fighting it is about his only path to some kind of decency. OTOH, it derails his storyline. I’m actually more interested in Jason trying to become a better teacher – obviously by rejecting the whole sex with students thing, but also by learning to actually teach, which he seemed to want to do, even if he wasn’t making any real progress, than in the Jason as bartender idea.
Of course, maybe Willis has something clever in mind I haven’t even considered.
Or he shows up and quite reasonably protests that he has no idea who he’s supposed to show up with as it’s impractical to bring every single student he might have tutored. Then he can at least find out if they have a name and go from there. If they ask how many students he’s tutored and the answer is one, it might not go so well, although “I wasn’t making any effort to remember who and all I tutored; I didn’t know I needed to,” should still be accurate though. Honestly, I don’t think Jason liked being a TA.
A lot of university policies seem to boil down to “exactly enough oversight to have a policy in place that looks harsh so long as no one thinks it through.” This particular one seems like it works on paper – after all, if you’re accused of boinking a student, just show up with that student and both of you can explain that didn’t happen!
Except, of course, that it’s also possible for Penny to throw Jason under the bus, like so. She didn’t name an “afflicted student,” which means Jason needs to produce one… which is tantamount to an admission of guilt, because the complaint was otherwise anonymous, and the university takes these things seriously. In other words, it’s very well-designed to put the onus of proving innocence squarely on Jason’s shoulders, which he can’t do without proving himself guilty.
It also sounds so obviously ripe for abuse in cases where extortion was occurring. Like, what, you’re just expecting the extortion to stop when the teacher’s under threat of losing their job and the board has a name to investigate?
Oh, academia. For a bunch of allegedly smart people you’re all so fucking clueless.
And the worst thing about this approach is that, assuming he was both guilty and more of an asshole than he actually is, this would set him in the perfect position to extort, blackmail, bribe or otherwise manipulate the student into supporting his story and letting him off the hook.
You do not, in any kind of suspected harassment situation – or any suspected rules violation – rely on the alleged perpetrator to contact the victim.
In UK English it means “woken”. As in “What time do you want knocked up in the morning?” In the days when not everyone who started work early had an alarm clock, there was a job with the official title of knocker-upper.
These days I think everyone’s familiar enough with the US meaning that it’s largely fallen into disuse.
A quick poll of my office and a couple of WhatsApp groups (aged 18-45) reveals not a single person that has ever uses “knocked up” to mean “be woken up”. At a push, you might get “what time do you want me to knock in the morning?” if you want someone else to wake you up.
I remember Daphne on Frasier once using it in the “woken up” way and it confused all my friends then, too.
My new favorite example of this trope comes from a local radio segment about a group of Australian firefighters who have come to help fight Californian wild fires.
Aussie: “Back home, when you call for a tanker, you get a truck. Here, you get an airplane.”
I actually found the NPR story (the link has transcript and audio). The speaker is from Melbourne, but he is a liaison officer so he’s probably used to Americanizing his speech for American media.
The actual quote is much better than I remembered it:
“We were laughing because if we ask for a tanker at home, we get a truck with wheels on it,” Eagle says with a smile. “If you ask for a tanker in America, you’ll get an airplane to drop water on top of you.
Why not? I mean, what something is called can vary wildly, depending on where in the U.S. you are — like what you call carbonated drinks, for instance.
Well, good to see Sal’s aware of all the shortcomings of this plan. (Or at least the first several. Working at Galasso’s clearly has like twenty that can’t be predicted by most people. On the one hand it appears to be a totally legit business despite the shady payment and hiring practices, and Pamela probably knows how to keep them out of trouble for tax fraud and the like? On the other hand, you are absolutely working for a supervillain with all that entails, and he’s not especially grounded in reality so, you know, I wonder.)
Speaking of Galasso’s supervillainy, I actually got ahold of BTAS on DVD last year (of course, RIGHT before they announce Blu-Ray…) and after getting to the Ra’s al Ghul episodes I understand what Galasso’s parodying so much better now.
Two supervillains, Pamela is the brains behind Galasso’s sheer force of will.
It’s kind of sad how they turned out in the Walkyverse. I assume that Shortpacked was originally a temporary part of Pamela’s schemes, but when she died, Galasso was just unable to move on without her.
I sometimes feel like Pamela can’t be a supervillain, she doesn’t have nearly the dramatic flair! Then I consider that that’s probably because Galasso has so much that her putting focus into presentation would be overload. She probably just adjusts his to be more in line with their overall plans or something. Either way Pamela is DEFINITELY the evil mastermind. (I guarantee their buyouts of other local pizza joints were all her doing, for instance.)
The last queen of England was called Anne, by the way. Bloody Mary was queen of England between Queen Jane (whom she had beheaded) and Queen Elizabeth the First.
I expect Jason would find it nigh impossible to have any really significant issues involving his visa just from working like this even if he’s J1, let alone the more likely F1. In order to face trouble, someone would have to suspect/know he’s working in violation of his visa and report him. With his specific ethnic background that is significantly unlikely.
Hell, if he’s smart and is on an F1 visa, all he’d really need to do is talk to the school DSO or ISA and tell them he “sees no point in fighting this” and ask permission for off campus employment, which under the circumstances is reasonably allowable, and he’d actually be legally fine. Yeah, yeah… title of the comic, I’m just pointing this fact out.
Maybe he’s afraid bringing it up will bring the attention of Dargon somehow? Or the fact that his new job is sketchy? Probably just Jason making terrible decisions and not bothering to look things up and realize it isn’t as bad as it could be, as usual.
I’d never heard anyone actually call it pop until I met my cousin’s husband (he’s from Illinois). Everyone around her either says “soda” or “coke.” Hence, Jeff Foxworthy’s routine which contains the following exchange:
“You wanna coke?”
“Sure.”
“What kind ya want?”
“Pepsi.”
I can understand people calling it “soda” instead of “pop”. The one I don’t get is how in some parts of the U.S. people apparently call all kinds of pop “coke”. Coke is a brand name, if someone asked me if I wanted a coke I’d say, “No, I prefer Pepsi”.
That happens in the Southeast US, the cultural capital of which is the birthplace of the Coca-Cola brand. Popular usage is that all pop (or “soe-dah,” as my East Coast relatives insist upon saying) is Coke. Among older SEUS-ians of my acquaintance, all refrigerators, regardless of actual brand name, are “Frigidaires.” Pedantry is met at first with amused tolerance of the self-revealed Yankee. Subsequent offenses are met with a “Well, bless your heart.” Beyond that are tales too terrifying to tell.
With Jason under a cloud of suspicion for sleeping with a student, someone’s probably going through the grades he gave with a fine-toothed comb to see if there are any discrepancies there.
There ARE discrepancies, thanks to Amber. Those discrepancies lead to Walky.
A little bit of thought would cause the investigators to make inquiries and discover some heated, hushed conversations between Jason and Walky’s twin sister.
Possibly, but that is only if they know how to do that and if they are competent enough to do that. You’re also assuming these investigators are going to a) think, b) not immediately assume the student he was sleeping with was Walky, c) actually care enough to do an in-depth investigation.
I’m half English, raised in the US, and use American mannerisms and pronunciations for most things. There is only one exception, and that is the word basil. On this hill, I will readily die.
Half-Brit here too, and we watched a lot of PBS Britcoms. Between those, a bit of a speech impediment that I tried to over-enunciate to counteract, and voraciously reading my way through Dad’s sci-fi/fantasy collection, half of which were British editions, my spelling and accent were all over the place. I’d just sit there looking at a word like “armor” thinking “I know that’s right but it feels like it needs a u and I have no idea why.”
British, but lived in California for 2 years, aged 6-8. It took me a few years to work out the differences (and I still sometimes fall into Americanisms, especially in spoken English and when I’m tired, even though I basically sound like Mary Poppins on helium – when I mentioned those 2 years at my first proper job, all my colleagues said in unison “Oooooh – that explains it!”) but as I work in academic publishing I do actually switch between them deliberately as needed too…
I dunno if I am alone on this one, but I kinda like how they each get to be their kinda unfiltered self around each other. I kinda ship it. Especially now that he doesn’t work at the college.
Wait, wait… Okay, suddenly, their pillow-talk becomes a bit interesting. I mean, when, in the course of their near-hate-#$*^ing, did they happen to bring up zebras?
Maybe it came from a class problem. “A zebra is running from two lions at 35 m/s. Both lions start 300 feet behind the zebra, 60 feet away from each other, and pursue straight at the zebra at 45 meters per second. Find the derivative of the lion-zebra-lion angle with respect to time.” Boom, zebra pronunciation established.
In retrospect, the day after she had to play happy daughter to her shithead parents was probably NOT a good day to call her that. Not that Danny could possibly have known that but …yeah, no, that was never gonna fly without comment.
Loading ...
People actually say Zeh-bra? Honestly don’t think I’ve ever heard that one. Words are weird.
I’m now second-guessing myself about how I say it. it’s like when someone asked me how I pronounce “banana”. as soon as I think about it, I don’t know the answer and I’m too aware of it to just accidentally say it naturally (however that is).
on the other hand, I am quite certain that potato and tomato do *not* rhyme. 🙂
Wait what? Like, Potayto and Tomahto, or?
I heard Americans say Tomayto
Potayto, Potahto
Let’s call the whole thing off.
Funny you mention “banana”. The US and UK pronounce that differently, too. Banahna (UK) vs banaena (US). My ex’s sister pronounced it wrong in front of their English mother, once, and she gave her a look that had his sister panicking to correct herself. “Banahna! I meant banahna!”
I have never understood that. Why would you pronounce the second “a” sound different than the first one? To be consistent, it should be pronounced bahnahna.
Must be a regional thing. I’m American and all the As in “banana” sound the same when I say it.
Yep, I’m American (New England) and I’ve never heard a banana pronounced any other way than Banahna. I didn’t even know there *was* another pronounciation.
Because language usage evolves and doesn’t consider consistency.
Spoken language generally precedes and drives spelling anyway – though spelling can long lag speech changes.
In the US here – I’ve never even heard, let alone used banaena. If it’s in the U.S. it’s a regionalism, and given that I travel for work I’m pretty confident it’s not common in a decent area.
Yeah British people pronounce it like that. I think Australians do too.
And South Africans, as evidenced with Trevor Noah when talking about an Egyptian zoo that had allegedly painted a donkey to resemble a Zeh-bra. He was quite adamant about it, too – it’s on YouTube for those curious.
South Africans do, too. At least one particular South African does. That one South African would be Trevor Noah.
“I hope I change one thing in your hearts forever, just one thing, and that is: That animal in the wild that looks like a horse, it has black and white stripes… do me a favor, from now on: it’s not ZEE-brah, it’s ZEB-rah. Just like it’s not DEE-brah, it’s DEB-rah. Same structure of word.
Plus you can not name them ’cause you do not have them.”
— Trevor Noah, “African American”
I didn’t realize it was spelled “zeborah”.
Personally, I pronounce it ‘stripey horse’.
Tiger-pony
Atheist-killers (Hitchhiker for life!).
Yep, ‘zeh-bra’, ‘to-mah-to’, and ‘waw-ter’ for that matter. I nearly died of thirst on a United Airlines flight back to Oz, but was saved when a bilingual fellow passenger told the flight attendant that I wanted some ‘WAH-duh’.
“Watteau, dear?”
“What a terrible joke!”
“But it’s my only line!”
that sounds closer to how we pronounce it in spanish but I had no idea british people did that too.
Yeah, we pronounce it like it starts with a Zed rather than a Zee.
Canadians say “Zed” rather than “Zee”, but I’m not sure how they say Zebra. I have IMed an informant.
“Zee-brah”; but we’d understand “zeh-brah”. I mean, the sound the letter makes is “zzzz”, no vowels implied.
However, the letter is called ‘zed,’ not ‘zee,’ and I will die on this hill.
‘Zulu’, thank you very much. Go phonetic or go home.
India Tango-Oscar-Tango-Alpha-Lima-Lima-Yankee Aplha-Golf-Romeo-Echo-Echo
Victor-Echo-3-Romeo-Papa-Golf Charlie-Uniform-Lima Alpha-Romeo
My informant agrees with you.
Not all of them, the American pronunciation is pretty common. I have always thought that sticking a “d” sound in there was stupid.
“zed” is the original. Consider: in German, it’s “zett.” In Swedish, it’s “sata.” In Danish, “set.” In Greek, where the alphabet actually comes from, it is of course “zeta.” The only places that don’t use a hard consonant on the end are American English and Portuguese. Those Canadians who say “zee” only do so because of the dominance of American media in our culture.
I’ve only heard it that way in the context of where you can see lions.
Norway? *flees thread quickly*
I hear Norwegian lions are invisible. Few people have seen them.
Forget Norway. Only in Kenya. (more like Snoreway)
Absolutely. Evidence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPtBnhehPOU
I knew a professor who used to call dinosaurs “dinnasazaur”. He was a professor of theology, but still.
I’d have spelt it “zeb-ra,” because that’s how the phonemes break down, but as others have mentioned it’s the more common pronunciation outside of North America.
Admittedly, Zebras don’t come up that often in most people’s daily conversations.
Well, I’m off to Google ‘British people saying zebra’, avenge my death.
Zed-bra!
The best pronunciation
Yesterday’s comments: answered.
panel four is the summary of how I feel about university
‘Zeh-bra’ is also a thing down in Australia. Maybe Jason can move there instead.
I think the US student visa might still be an issue if he did that.
Say you’re Canadian! Then you can at least keep your ‘u’s in words, which Americans can’t seem to stand for some reason.
A lot of Canadians still say zee-bra though. Are there exceptions?
No idea. I’ve only ever heard zee-bra.
Do you also get to keep all the Z’s out of the middle of words? E.g civilisation rather than civilization.
We do not. Thoroughly Americanized there. We’re a neat little patchwork between English and American.
Huh? I’m Canadian, and I’ve only ever used “s” instead of “z”. And “c” instead of “s” in some words lol.
I use ‘s’ but every sodding spell checker changes it to ‘z’. Even those set to actual english not American English.
It’s an acceptable alternative spelling in UK-English so long as we’re talking -ise/-ize words (in fact, the OED prefers -ize English so if style schemes call for Oxford zenglish then that’s what they mean). Analyse, catalyse, and other words taking -yse in UK-English always do so, but are spelled with a z in US-English.
I get to explain the difference reasonably regularly at work (“Regarding your comment on the proofs, please be aware that the copy editor has not introduced ‘loads of errors’ into your work. As explained in the journal’s style guide – – this journal uses [language scheme] meaning [set of words] are all correct. As a result, please be aware that we will not be changing these spellings back to those used under [original language scheme] as this would make your paper inconsistent with other articles published in this journal”).
Aah, you can’t use angular brackets not as html code – those two dashes should have the word link between them, enclosed within a pair!
He’ll have to start pronouncing “out” sounds as “oot”, though.
(I kid I kid. Nobody from my region has any right to make fun of “wrong” pronunciation.)
I’m not sure what region of Canada made people think we say ‘oot’. It’s definitely ‘oat’ where I’ve lived (Ottawa and Toronto).
Is “about” pronounced “a bout”, “a boot”, or “a boat”? I’d expect “a boot” around Wisconsin.
People in the U.S. use “o” instead of “ou” to pay respect to our proud tradition of never having been ruled by the French.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_colonization_of_the_Americas#/media/File:Nouvelle-France_map-en.svg
Louisiana would like a word with you.
Unfortunately you wouldn’t understand a word they are saying.
“Laissez les Bon Temps Rouler!”
*plays Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime” on the jukebox*
I got a passport
A couple a visas
Nobody knows my real name…
Headcanon: Jason sounds like Weebl.
Weebl doing a James May impression.
“Pinch a littler harder there Scrawns?” WTF does that mean?
He said in a pinch he could fake being American, but he can’t bring himself to do it. She’s saying ‘pinch a little harder there’ in reference to that.
The moment you realize British slang is easier to understand than southern drawl.
I periodically re-realize that a southern drawl is a British accent, but drawlier.
You are aware that there is not one version of British slang. For a local, they can tell not only where you grew up by your use of slang, but what side of the street.
Thanks for the explanation, Sal’s comment confused me as well.
And she’s a teenager, so she’s kicking in a teenage shortening of “scrawny”, as in “you shore is a scrawny lil thang”.
How is “scrawns” a shortening of “scrawny”?
It’s the exact same number of letters!
Letters are a writing thing. She’s talking. And for talking, it’s one syllable less.
It sounds to me like “they” don’t have any evidence against Jason. He could probably win this one if he chose to fight.
And yet he won’t fight it because he actually IS guilty and he doesn’t want to end up in a situation where he’ll have to reveal Sal’s identity.
Reveal Sal’s identity as the student he didn’t sleep with?
Which is what he’d wind up doing if he successfully fought it.
Penny knows, she was there when they had their session and Jason already admitted to it when she mentioned she got him fired to. That’s both a confession and someone who can identify the student.
Well, Penny likely suspects it was Sal, since that’s the case where he had an off-hours tutoring session. We don’t know if she identified her to their bosses, especially since she was just making it up when she made the accusation.
If Jason was a decent liar, he could still claim to have no idea who he was accused of banging, unless they gave him a name or at least description. At which point he could still claim it was just tutoring and try to persuade Sal to back him up.
Penny’s word isn’t good evidence, considering her situation. “She’s just trying to get back at me since she’s getting canned anyway.” If she didn’t identify Sal at first, but did once he admitted it to her, then she’s changing her story and that lessens her credibility. Beyond that, it seems like she still hasn’t identified her, so there’s still nothing to go on.
Except that Jason isn’t contesting it.
The problem is, as has been pointed out, that for some terrible fucking reason Jason fighting it would require bringing the alleged student with him to the hearing. Which, if they genuinely don’t know who it is because Penny didn’t give a name, means any student he brings gives some inherent credibility to the accusation. And is still a terrible idea for student safety in such cases, we cannot overstate what a terrible policy that is when the accusation is based on a nonspecific secondhand account that Penny didn’t even think was true and just made out of spite.
Like the fact that Jason IS guilty and feels guilt for it is contributing to his not fighting, but at the same time the oversight structure in place is so poorly thought out I don’t think he actually could win.
Also I don’t think Jason can lie very well anyway, which he would have to do to fight it. By omission, sure, but claiming he didn’t bring the student because there was none would be a straight falsehood. Dude can’t even keep composure during a normal tutoring session with Sal, who was actually trying to learn.
Does he need to say anything? Can’t he show up and face his (nonexistent) accuser?
His chance to contest being fired is to show up at the hearing. The email specifies to bring the affected student. So either he gets Sal (or someone else) to lie for him, and a student showing up at all is implicit acknowledgement that something improper was observed… or he attends the hearing alone and claims that Penny’s report was baseless and spite-driven (true), and that there was no student and no appearance of impropriety, much less actual impropriety (very, very false.)
Again, he has to show up to contest it in person, and doing so requires some form of lying because he is guilty AND a no-win situation to begin with. And we’re talking about a man who can’t hide his contempt for a student long enough to have a bad tutoring session without making snide remarks about her intelligence, life choices, and taste in men. (Seriously Jason manages to fail even the lowest possible bars of working with students.)
Found the strip where he gets the email:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/03-faz-is-great/tribunal/
Are we really encouraging Jason to lie? Why would we want him to? He’s showing….the lowest possible amount of honor.
Why would we not? I mean, it’s not like he somehow coerced Sal into boinking him, she complained about not getting any, then whipped her shirt off and said “you’ll do” before attacking him. While she would have liked to also get a better grade because of it, that wasn’t her intent, and he didn’t adjust her grade for it, he handed grading her off to somebody else.
Sometimes, there’s nothing dishonorable about lying, and this is one of those times. It’s completely appropriate.
Of course, he’s also a terrible teacher, but that’s got nothing to do with this issue.
First of all, he didn’t hand her grades off the first time, second of all Sal made it clear that grades were, in fact, her intent (Jason acknowledged it in slip shine but then played stupid when Sal confronted him later), and third of all it’s always inappropriate for a teacher to bang their student and he deserved to be fired for it even if it weren’t for grades and he always handed them off. Him lying is completely inappropriate.
Yeah, I am definitely glad he’s losing his job, it’s the most decent thing he’s done in pretty much the entire strip. BBCC has demonstrated why his actions were blatantly unethical and worth firing over, as I’ve said he was a terrible teacher from the start, and him fighting it* would leave him with basically no positive qualities whatsoever.
* With the Walky plot thread giving a potential thing that Jason returning would add drama to, I can see some series of events occurring that leads to him fighting it. But for him to do it and retain any decency, it would have to be on someone’s behalf other than his own – the ‘Sal’s name is in this and it might reach Linda’ scenario being the most likely.
That’s pretty much my stance – not fighting it is about his only path to some kind of decency. OTOH, it derails his storyline. I’m actually more interested in Jason trying to become a better teacher – obviously by rejecting the whole sex with students thing, but also by learning to actually teach, which he seemed to want to do, even if he wasn’t making any real progress, than in the Jason as bartender idea.
Of course, maybe Willis has something clever in mind I haven’t even considered.
Or he shows up and says since there wasn’t any girl involved, it is impossible to bring this non-existent girl to the hearing.
Or he shows up and quite reasonably protests that he has no idea who he’s supposed to show up with as it’s impractical to bring every single student he might have tutored. Then he can at least find out if they have a name and go from there. If they ask how many students he’s tutored and the answer is one, it might not go so well, although “I wasn’t making any effort to remember who and all I tutored; I didn’t know I needed to,” should still be accurate though. Honestly, I don’t think Jason liked being a TA.
A lot of university policies seem to boil down to “exactly enough oversight to have a policy in place that looks harsh so long as no one thinks it through.” This particular one seems like it works on paper – after all, if you’re accused of boinking a student, just show up with that student and both of you can explain that didn’t happen!
Except, of course, that it’s also possible for Penny to throw Jason under the bus, like so. She didn’t name an “afflicted student,” which means Jason needs to produce one… which is tantamount to an admission of guilt, because the complaint was otherwise anonymous, and the university takes these things seriously. In other words, it’s very well-designed to put the onus of proving innocence squarely on Jason’s shoulders, which he can’t do without proving himself guilty.
It also sounds so obviously ripe for abuse in cases where extortion was occurring. Like, what, you’re just expecting the extortion to stop when the teacher’s under threat of losing their job and the board has a name to investigate?
Oh, academia. For a bunch of allegedly smart people you’re all so fucking clueless.
Allegedly smart, indeed!
http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
And the worst thing about this approach is that, assuming he was both guilty and more of an asshole than he actually is, this would set him in the perfect position to extort, blackmail, bribe or otherwise manipulate the student into supporting his story and letting him off the hook.
You do not, in any kind of suspected harassment situation – or any suspected rules violation – rely on the alleged perpetrator to contact the victim.
universities: all the corruption of a corporation, all the unaccountable bureaucracy of government.
Google them saying “aubergines” and “courgettes.” Divided by a common language…
Oh, and Jason comes from a land where you can “knock someone up” in the morning and no one thinks anything of it.
Very divided, especially since we Americans pronounce those words as “eggplants ” and “zucchini”.
At least we’re united in calling them “pineapples”.
In Australian English, “knocked up” means “tired, fatigued”.
Back in 1942 my mother had an American boyfriend. She said…
In UK English it means “woken”. As in “What time do you want knocked up in the morning?” In the days when not everyone who started work early had an alarm clock, there was a job with the official title of knocker-upper.
These days I think everyone’s familiar enough with the US meaning that it’s largely fallen into disuse.
A quick poll of my office and a couple of WhatsApp groups (aged 18-45) reveals not a single person that has ever uses “knocked up” to mean “be woken up”. At a push, you might get “what time do you want me to knock in the morning?” if you want someone else to wake you up.
I remember Daphne on Frasier once using it in the “woken up” way and it confused all my friends then, too.
America: Where crisps are chips and chips are fries and you can’t fix the braces on your trousers while taking a lift.
and everyone can see your pants, if you’re wearing any. 🙂
My new favorite example of this trope comes from a local radio segment about a group of Australian firefighters who have come to help fight Californian wild fires.
Aussie: “Back home, when you call for a tanker, you get a truck. Here, you get an airplane.”
I’m certain he said “aeroplane”. Or possibly just “plane”.
I actually found the NPR story (the link has transcript and audio). The speaker is from Melbourne, but he is a liaison officer so he’s probably used to Americanizing his speech for American media.
The actual quote is much better than I remembered it:
“We were laughing because if we ask for a tanker at home, we get a truck with wheels on it,” Eagle says with a smile. “If you ask for a tanker in America, you’ll get an airplane to drop water on top of you.
See, and in Canada, you’d get a ship full of oil. O.o
Why would he need to Americanise his speech?
Because he’s a liaison officer to the American media. When communication is your job, you don’t want to cause confusion over differences in dialect.
I dunno about that. I’m from Texas, and here, a tanker is a big truck hauling a trailer that carries liquid in it.
Maybe it’s just a Cal Fire thing.
Why not? I mean, what something is called can vary wildly, depending on where in the U.S. you are — like what you call carbonated drinks, for instance.
Yeah, pretty sure that only applies when you ask for a tanker while fighting wild fires.
More jargon than dialect.
You’re both wrong. A tanker is a guy who drives an tracked armored fighting vehicle with a big gun on the top.
Yup, that is what I was going to say.
In my corner of Canada, he’d get a cargo ship if he asked for a tanker. We call the firefighting planes ‘water bombers’.
And people eat biscuits with gravy
Well, we eat pretty much everything with some kind of gravy… :/
We put gravy on our gravy. That’s how friggin’ country we am.
Yo dawg, I heard you like gravy…
Well of course not! Trousers don’t have teeth in America!
Then what holds your zippers closed? 😀
Trosers?
Well, good to see Sal’s aware of all the shortcomings of this plan. (Or at least the first several. Working at Galasso’s clearly has like twenty that can’t be predicted by most people. On the one hand it appears to be a totally legit business despite the shady payment and hiring practices, and Pamela probably knows how to keep them out of trouble for tax fraud and the like? On the other hand, you are absolutely working for a supervillain with all that entails, and he’s not especially grounded in reality so, you know, I wonder.)
Speaking of Galasso’s supervillainy, I actually got ahold of BTAS on DVD last year (of course, RIGHT before they announce Blu-Ray…) and after getting to the Ra’s al Ghul episodes I understand what Galasso’s parodying so much better now.
Two supervillains, Pamela is the brains behind Galasso’s sheer force of will.
It’s kind of sad how they turned out in the Walkyverse. I assume that Shortpacked was originally a temporary part of Pamela’s schemes, but when she died, Galasso was just unable to move on without her.
I sometimes feel like Pamela can’t be a supervillain, she doesn’t have nearly the dramatic flair! Then I consider that that’s probably because Galasso has so much that her putting focus into presentation would be overload. She probably just adjusts his to be more in line with their overall plans or something. Either way Pamela is DEFINITELY the evil mastermind. (I guarantee their buyouts of other local pizza joints were all her doing, for instance.)
Jason is cool. I like him
Jason, please. If you were any British-er, you’d be the bloody Queen of England.
Wouldn’t that be Mary?
Yep. There’s been no queen of England since 1707.
But none of them have been called “bloody”
None of nobody?
The last queen of England was called Anne, by the way. Bloody Mary was queen of England between Queen Jane (whom she had beheaded) and Queen Elizabeth the First.
Then who was that talking after Doctor Who, last Christmas?
If he were any britisher he’d be german?????
Don’t forget the extra letter in aluminum. Heathens!
And be careful with that meethane gas, it’s highly flammable.
It’s called “Heavens” over here!
Also, what is it with Americans dropping the H in ‘herbs?’
Base was from Old French, where the h should be dropped, and it was pronounced that way in British English as well until the 19th century.
This one is actually you guys pronouncing it wrong. Probably because of the Victorians.
You want to have some fun? Go to Michigan and pronounce the various geographic and street names with the proper French pronunciation.
Eh, I hear plenty of Americans saying “herbs.” Just like lately many people have been pronouncing the “t” in “often.”
“Do you mean orphan, a person who has lost his parents, or often, frequently?”
+1 for Penzance reference
I said orphan frequently only once!
Herbs are what’s in food.
‘erbs are what you put in your shampoo and tea.
I expect Jason would find it nigh impossible to have any really significant issues involving his visa just from working like this even if he’s J1, let alone the more likely F1. In order to face trouble, someone would have to suspect/know he’s working in violation of his visa and report him. With his specific ethnic background that is significantly unlikely.
Hell, if he’s smart and is on an F1 visa, all he’d really need to do is talk to the school DSO or ISA and tell them he “sees no point in fighting this” and ask permission for off campus employment, which under the circumstances is reasonably allowable, and he’d actually be legally fine. Yeah, yeah… title of the comic, I’m just pointing this fact out.
Maybe he’s afraid bringing it up will bring the attention of Dargon somehow? Or the fact that his new job is sketchy? Probably just Jason making terrible decisions and not bothering to look things up and realize it isn’t as bad as it could be, as usual.
….Is Sal feeling guilty there in that first panel?
One time I lived somewhere where people expected me to say “soda” instead of “pop”. I get where Jason’s coming from, if only a little.
I hate football. I will fight to the death for the right of calling it football instead of soccer.
I stick to calling it “association football” just to avoid confusion.
I’d never heard anyone actually call it pop until I met my cousin’s husband (he’s from Illinois). Everyone around her either says “soda” or “coke.” Hence, Jeff Foxworthy’s routine which contains the following exchange:
“You wanna coke?”
“Sure.”
“What kind ya want?”
“Pepsi.”
around *here* [facepalm]
I grew up on the border of those dialect maps, so we we mostly said soda or coke but pop wasn’t unheard of.
I prefer:
“You wanna coke?”
“Sure.”
“What kind ya want?”
“Crack.”
I can understand people calling it “soda” instead of “pop”. The one I don’t get is how in some parts of the U.S. people apparently call all kinds of pop “coke”. Coke is a brand name, if someone asked me if I wanted a coke I’d say, “No, I prefer Pepsi”.
That happens in the Southeast US, the cultural capital of which is the birthplace of the Coca-Cola brand. Popular usage is that all pop (or “soe-dah,” as my East Coast relatives insist upon saying) is Coke. Among older SEUS-ians of my acquaintance, all refrigerators, regardless of actual brand name, are “Frigidaires.” Pedantry is met at first with amused tolerance of the self-revealed Yankee. Subsequent offenses are met with a “Well, bless your heart.” Beyond that are tales too terrifying to tell.
Now imagine being asked to go to the Coke machines to buy a Pepsi.
Trevor Noah feels the same way Jason.
I’d like to see Jason try to talk like an American. It would be fucking hilarious.
A thought just occurred to me.
With Jason under a cloud of suspicion for sleeping with a student, someone’s probably going through the grades he gave with a fine-toothed comb to see if there are any discrepancies there.
There ARE discrepancies, thanks to Amber. Those discrepancies lead to Walky.
A little bit of thought would cause the investigators to make inquiries and discover some heated, hushed conversations between Jason and Walky’s twin sister.
… so yes, this might lead back to Sal after all.
I think you have forgotten Amber stealing the file to prevent discrepancies.
I didn’t. I’m just remembering Murphey’s Law.
…. huh, what if as part of the investigation they looked at the electronic versions BEFORE she changed them, and so another copy exists somewhere?
Possibly, but that is only if they know how to do that and if they are competent enough to do that. You’re also assuming these investigators are going to a) think, b) not immediately assume the student he was sleeping with was Walky, c) actually care enough to do an in-depth investigation.
Somehow, I didn’t really get the idea that anyone at that university would be bothered to put in the work for… anything responsible, really.
This thread got me looking up different accents, and I just found out about probably the weirdest American accent I’ve ever heard.
Truly Jason is an example for us all!
6th panel Jason, I know exactly what you mean.
“And the bowtie…”
“THEY CAN TAKE IT FROM MY COLD CORPSE!”
“And your last name…”
“NEVER… wait actually they can have that one”
Plays Englishman in New York” on the hacked Muzak.
Seriously what is this hacked Muzak?
I’m half English, raised in the US, and use American mannerisms and pronunciations for most things. There is only one exception, and that is the word basil. On this hill, I will readily die.
The terrain doesn’t favor your stand there. If you’ve ported in the accent and are harboring it, that means it’s a bay’s hill.
Half-Brit here too, and we watched a lot of PBS Britcoms. Between those, a bit of a speech impediment that I tried to over-enunciate to counteract, and voraciously reading my way through Dad’s sci-fi/fantasy collection, half of which were British editions, my spelling and accent were all over the place. I’d just sit there looking at a word like “armor” thinking “I know that’s right but it feels like it needs a u and I have no idea why.”
British, but lived in California for 2 years, aged 6-8. It took me a few years to work out the differences (and I still sometimes fall into Americanisms, especially in spoken English and when I’m tired, even though I basically sound like Mary Poppins on helium – when I mentioned those 2 years at my first proper job, all my colleagues said in unison “Oooooh – that explains it!”) but as I work in academic publishing I do actually switch between them deliberately as needed too…
I dunno if I am alone on this one, but I kinda like how they each get to be their kinda unfiltered self around each other. I kinda ship it. Especially now that he doesn’t work at the college.
Naw, I ship the hell out of it as well. 😀
You’re not the only one that does but personally I don’t see it.
Bonky-tonkin’ is a new favorite term of mine now. Sadly it’s an Americanism Jason may never utter.
I prefer slap-jackin’.
You’re both making up words now, right?
… Now I’m kind of curious how much usage either of those get outside of DoA.
Sal knows a bit about code switching.
Wait, wait… Okay, suddenly, their pillow-talk becomes a bit interesting. I mean, when, in the course of their near-hate-#$*^ing, did they happen to bring up zebras?
Maybe it was during their first tutoring session? The one that made her grades worse?
Maybe it came from a class problem. “A zebra is running from two lions at 35 m/s. Both lions start 300 feet behind the zebra, 60 feet away from each other, and pursue straight at the zebra at 45 meters per second. Find the derivative of the lion-zebra-lion angle with respect to time.” Boom, zebra pronunciation established.
British and Americans take too seriously English pronunciations.
The only true way to pronounce English words is the Scottish way.
What, an incomprehensible garbled mumble?
Glaswegians aren’t the only Scots.
they speak enough bewilderment for the entire nation (checks to see if subtitles can be had for ‘Taggart’)
I suspect what Sal was really asking there was whether she was the only one. So that we can continue to ship it.
(I don’t. Teacher/student is a STRONG LINE for me. But I also accept people are making bad partner decisions in this storyline.)
Gotta put some decency limits here, Sallie.
“Do I look like a fuckin’ Sally to you?“
In retrospect, the day after she had to play happy daughter to her shithead parents was probably NOT a good day to call her that. Not that Danny could possibly have known that but …yeah, no, that was never gonna fly without comment.
‘Yer gonna be saving a lot of time previosly spent typing Us’
FTFY!
Weird twist, I live in New Zealand and I hear a lot of people say “Zay-bra” never understood that one.
Honestly, why is Jason admitting to sleeping with a student? They don’t actually have any evidence he did. Penny even thought she was making it up.
Probably an honour thing. He’s willing to do it but not willing to lie about it when he is called out for it.