Good Cop, Dadaist Cop
by Jeff
Image text: NOW INVENT AN IMPOSSIBLE-TO-TRANSLATE LANGUAGE AND USE IT TO TELL US WHERE THE MONEY IS.
So, this is a play on the traditional police officer strategy of "Good Cop, Bad Cop", in which two officers play different parts to get the suspect to give the required information. One is nice to the suspect and the other is mean to the suspect.
However, in this comic, they use the strategy "Good Cop, Dadaist Cop" strategy in which one is nice to the suspect and the other is Dadaist, which is defined as (via the Free Dictionary) an European artistic and literary movement (1916-1923) that flouted conventional aesthetic and cultural values by producing works marked by nonsense, travesty, and incongruity.
So, the Dadaist cop is spouting nonsense attempting to get the suspect to give some information. Unfortunately, I don't think it is going to work.
February 17th, 2012
Forget the crazy – Who’s the hot blond cop?!?!?!?!?!
February 17th, 2012
Totally off topic, but the coolest thing I’ve seen for a while, and should appeal to xkcd readers:
The Scale of the Universe
http://htwins.net/scale2/scale2.swf?bordercolor=white
(Takes a little while to load)
February 17th, 2012
Nice Link!
BTW, (back on topic) as a child in the sixties the BBC broadcast some pretty wackie children’s TV. One of which was ‘Do Not Adjust Your Set’ and the resident pop group was The Bonzo Dog DooDah Band. Originally they were called The Bonzo Dog DaDa Band and were brilliantly surreal, inventive and funny. Love’d ‘em and I still do, perhaps that’s why I always check out XKCD.
Or maybe the Bonzos’ ‘…warped my fragile wittle mind!’
Who knows.
February 17th, 2012
… and in the ’70s, Saturday Night Live once did a sketch called “Sartresky & Hutch.” One of the tag lines they used was, “One’s tough. The other’s existential.”
February 17th, 2012
The BBC was a child in the 60s?
February 17th, 2012
Thanks Bob, I now realise the equivocal nature of my opening statement. Touché. ;-D
February 17th, 2012
That wasn’t me, that was the other Bob.
February 17th, 2012
I took a class in college, in French, and we studied (insofar as one can) dadaism, surrealism, and existentialism.
One day, the girl next to me raised her hand and started out, “This is off the subject, but..”… Professor La Charité interrupted immediately, with, “It’s *never* off the subject. Continue.”
We all felt we learned something that day. Giraffe.
February 17th, 2012
Sidenotes:
As I’m sure most people are aware, Mark Zuckerberg is the co-founder of Facebook;
Church Latin (aka Ecclesiastical Latin) is a particular style of the Latin language used mainly by the Catholic Church.
The premise of Good Cop/Bad Cop is usually that the “bad cop” is overly aggressive and scares the suspect, while giving a sort of “mutual enemy” which the good cop can use to attempt to relate to the suspect, and it also makes the “good cop” seem a lot nicer and more trustworthy by simple comparison.
Even though it is random nonsense, the “dadaist cop” still seems to be playing a “bad cop” role in terms of aggression. It might work! :-p
February 17th, 2012
I agree! I think a fair number of criminals would give up the info to get that “crazy” dadaist from spouting any more nonsense at them.
February 17th, 2012
From the last picture showing the suspect being desperate, I think this method seems to be working well
February 17th, 2012
And the other cop will seem eminently sane by comparison, and might even be able to get that crazy woman OFF of him is he cooperates!
February 17th, 2012
Okay, a OT question. This is not picking on Jeff in any way (enough other people do that sometimes), I’m just curious about the expression he used “an European”. That sounds weird to me, as I’m used to saying “a European”. But the rule I know is “if the word starts with a vowel, use AN, if it starts with a consonant, use A”, so I don’t appear to be following the rule. Why is that? Maybe because while European starts with a vowel letter, it starts with a Y (why) sound. Does that put it in the consonant category to be paired with A, or do we use AN since the word does start with a vowel (two, actually, so maybe it should be ANN? ) and/or the Y sound, where Y is sometimes a vowel? Is “the rule” based on the starting letter, or the starting sound?
That’s my curiosity at work I could Google it, but I think I’ll just poll… who thinks it should be “A European” and who thinks it should be “AN European”? And why, if you want to expand further.
February 17th, 2012
Sorry, that should be: “starts with a Y (yih) sound.”
February 17th, 2012
I am an European and it certainly does not start with the sound “Y”, but rather “U”, which itself is a vowel as well. Whyropean?
February 17th, 2012
I think he means “Y” as in “Yellow”, which wouldn’t use an “an” (A yellow cab / an orange maker)
February 17th, 2012
Yes, I attempted to correct myself but probably not quickly enough for Cat’ to see it. And good follow up example.
February 20th, 2012
You’re European and can not even speak European? I’m European (German) and for me Europe starts with a sound like the oi in voice. Certainly there has to be a ‘n’ before oi. So Whynotropean!
February 20th, 2012
For most Europeans, Europe (in their native language) starts with an /eh/ sound. At least this is true for all speakers of Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Hungarian, Estonian, Finnish, Greek, Romanian, Baltic and Slavonic languages, which should already form the majority.
There are several languages of which I’m not sure about how they pronounce Europe (i.e. Scandinavic languages; Romanic languages other then the ones stated above, French, or Portuguese; Maltese; Albanian; Caucasian languages and several minority languages in Russia), but I doubt that any language other then German (and perhaps Frisian, too) pronounce as an /oi/ sound.
February 21st, 2012
Obviously my comment was not recognizable as irony. I apologize for that.
The question how different European languages pronounce Europe is quite fascinating (but probably off topic in here). There is a German dictionary that offers sound for different languages. http://dict.leo.org/chde?lp=chde&search=europa
Looks like Chinese also use the /oi/ sound.
February 17th, 2012
This seems like a pretty definitive explanation of the usage of a/an. She eventually covers the Old English origins of the words.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/video/0029-an.htm
February 18th, 2012
And the editor in the video does mention my favourite, the use of an before a word starting with an “H”.
February 20th, 2012
Only when the ‘h’ is not aspirated, so
a herb,
a ham sndwich,
but
an hour
an honour
February 23rd, 2012
The first example depends on how you pronounce ‘herb’. Most people I know do not aspirate the ‘h’, and would say ‘an herb’.
February 24th, 2012
Then, according to everybody that I know, most people that you know are pronouncing it wrongly. I’ve only ever heard it pronounced unaspirated by those speaking “colonial” rather than “English”.
February 17th, 2012
In case you don’t want to watch a video for a simple question, it’s a simple typo. Examples: An hour, A Europe. Free Dictionary actually uses “a Europe,” not “an Europe.”
You us “an” before a vowel sound (which most of the time means before a vowel, but that’s not the rule).
February 17th, 2012
The rule is it’s an if it starts with a vowel SOUND. Not just a vowel. Which is why you can say I am A European person, or I am A unicorn, or I am AN honerable person. Vowel sounds get ‘an’ and consanant sounds get ‘a’.
February 17th, 2012
Yes, good point. And it’s “AN hour” even though it starts with an H because the H is silent. And I guess Y only sounds like a vowel when it’s pretending to be an I, all other times it’s treated like a consonant (including EU pretending to be a Y which is not pretending to be an I). Gotta love that English!
February 18th, 2012
Of course there’s also “an historic topic” versus “a horrible topic”
February 20th, 2012
It’s “a historic topic”, as the ‘h’ in “historic” is aspirated.
February 20th, 2012
You didn’t watch the video, did you? For some words starting with aspirated ‘h’, there is an historically (!) motivated possibility to use “an” instead of “a”. This usage, however, is judged especially formal and is not accepted by all authorities, nor is it applicable to all words starting with ‘h’ (only to hotel, history, hero, derived words and words starting with hypo- or hyper-).
Want a source? Bill Bryson: “Troublesome Words”.
February 21st, 2012
Bill Bryson doesn’t speak English, though. He speaks “colonial”.
February 17th, 2012
Could work — clearly this “bad” cop got the confession she wanted:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBN49_HED4o
February 17th, 2012
My first thought after this comic was Will Ferrell and Mark Whalberg doing what Will thought was “Bad Cop/Bad Cop” in The Other Guys.
February 18th, 2012
yeah, but the Lieutenant was just plain scarey.
February 17th, 2012
Anyone else feel that the “Why are my bones so small?” line was a little self-awareness at Randall’s drawing style?
February 17th, 2012
I didn’t catch that, but that could be. I would have gone with thin, though, rather than small. Small would denote all dimensions small, whereas her bones are certainly normal length, just impossibly skinny.
February 17th, 2012
Well, if you take the head as a unit of measurement, she’s about 4 heads tall, which would make her (and her bones) much smaller than the average human. Assuming a human-sized head, anyways.
February 17th, 2012
In a book on cults, I read that one technique for softening people into compliance is to flood them with nonsense, and whenever someone asks a question, say “We’ll deal with that later.” Never do, of course. Eventually the rational mind is overworked and stops trying to make sense. Maybe Dada Cop is trying something similar but somewhat faster?
February 18th, 2012
Zuck actually doesn’t have a mortgage, he rents.
http://www.allfacebook.com/mark-zuckerberg-moves-into-another-rental-house-2011-01
February 18th, 2012
That isn’t really Dadaist.
February 19th, 2012
The fact that the Mark Zuckerberg mortgage is published in Ecclesiastical Latin is a reference to the Donation of Constantine, also hinting to controversies about facebook foundations and wealth.