of
Explanation
This comic features a character being overwhelmed by the English word "of" and its many uses. The character recites a torrent of prepositions and function words: "Of, from, to, containing, by, during, related to, about, concerning, any amount, with, in, as, than, due to, for, one of, composed of, by, containing, and sometimes people just gave me a fuller word you can tell by context AAHHHHHHHH!"
Below, a dark, monstrous figure looms behind the panicking character, and the caption reads: "Prepositions are the villains of every language acquisition story."
The joke is about the notorious difficulty of learning English prepositions, particularly the word "of," which is one of the most common words in English but has an absurdly wide range of meanings and uses. Unlike content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) that have relatively clear definitions, function words like "of" derive their meaning almost entirely from context and can express dozens of different semantic relationships. For language learners, this makes prepositions a nightmare — there is no simple rule to learn, just an enormous number of idiomatic uses that must be absorbed through exposure.
The personification of this grammatical difficulty as a horror-movie villain (the dark monster) is a fun visual metaphor for how terrifying and overwhelming prepositions can feel to someone trying to learn a language. The comic resonates with anyone who has studied a foreign language and encountered a seemingly simple word that turns out to have countless context-dependent meanings.