Comic-strip writers, especially artist-writers, were not especially well-equipped to write dialect, Butch - they just didn't have the technique or, probably, the time. So we get "spankin' " when for most English-speaking people it's "spanking". I'm not sure what they were trying to suggest, as I believe it was only the British upper-class who for a time deliberately dropped the final "g" from "ing", and Zack Mosley's characters are certainly not of the English aristocracy.butch46163@yahoo.com wrote:Love The Smilin Jack spankings always notice that in some of these comic the writers tend to leave the G out of Spankingmaybe because of the accent?
A bigger mystery to me is why Mosley and some others had characters say "th' " for "the" - perhaps they were attempting to indicate the first (and only) vowel was to be cut short, but it never seemed to me they were re-creating any real speech I'd ever heard by doing so. But once one writer started to indicate dialect a certain way, every other writer tended to follow (think of all the Li'l Abner-imitators who stole Capp's attempt at writing "hill country" dialect - Effin' ah say so mahself!
Dialect writing is not easy, and in fact although my own writing technique is pretty solid I haven't had to worry much about it, probably because most of my own characters are Americans from the midwest. Also, you do have a certain amount of artistic license.
. Thanks, Phil
new discoveries, but I think we can talk about that next week.
Sulky sure does have pair of nice round buttocks 
