2011-07-03
Explanation
This comic tells the story of a teacher who decides to punish her high school students for overusing their thesauruses by setting up a fake thesaurus website. The site looked legitimate but contained nothing but fancy-sounding fake words. Sample entries are shown: synonyms for "conversation" include "speechitating," "mutuodialogtion," and "sonocommunicessence," while synonyms for "conversion" include "revelactation," "modifiction," and "morphatorium."
The students, already prone to unnecessary thesaurus abuse, eagerly adopt these fake words. The comic shows a student''s essay using them: "And Ophelia thusfore, was feigning insanitation, which subsequesterly morphatoriated into actual insanitation." When the teacher tries to confess that it was a prank, the fake words have spread so thoroughly that the students can no longer understand normal English. They respond with confused gibberish like "Whatly regards her speechitating?" and "I am lackrimonious as to that topicality."
The situation spirals out of control as the entire student body becomes "linguistically infected," with students asking each other to prom in the new dialect: "Wouldsest you accompany me at prom in one half-fortnight?" The narrator notes that in some ways the emerging dialect was beautiful, showing a sample of invented poetry. But the final punchline brings reality crashing in: the students are writing college admission essays in this nonsense language, and Harvard has rejected them. "What speechitated Harvard?" "They anti-yessed my applicatrix!" The votey panel shows someone telling the comic''s author that "Thesaurus jokes? This is a new low," to which he corrects: "Ahem A new nadir" -- itself a thesaurus substitution that perfectly caps the theme.