Finding the right words – Chap. 5, Act 4, Strip 49

And now you know how Snuka managed to escape from Dr. Dutchman Fu’s lethal trap of deadly doom: with cunning linguistics. Good thing those always come through for him.

But he really was in desperate straits up to that moment, as can be judged by the fact that he actually attempted to bribe the trapper – the way this adventure has turned out for him, he’s pretty much already running a loss, so that bribe would have amounted to throwing good money after the bad. Not something he’d ever consider unless the situation is really, really serious.

Fortunately, Snuka is fluent in many languages from his days as a street urching in Cairo. And with “fluent” I mean that he knows a few random stock phrases in each of them. Enough to get by, you know. Mostly things like “Can I carry your bags to your room, Sir?” and “So long, SUCKER! Hahahahahah!” in about two dozen languages. But “Sir, can you help me? Please!” is also among his standard phrases, since he sometimes used that set-up, as well. >_>

It really saved his neck, this time…or his ‘nads, at least. For it turns out that that Franco-Canadian woodsman wasn’t actually totally bereft of human compassion and decency. But as a trapper, he naturally reserves his compassion for humans, instead of animals, so it just wasn’t awoken before Snuka switched to French from English – which is exactly where somebody from Quebec tends to consider the human/animal boundary to be, according to the stereotype.

More on Monday.

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