Editing 2771: College Knowledge

{{comic
| number    = 2771
| date      = May 3, 2023
| title     = College Knowledge
| image     = college_knowledge_2x.png
| imagesize = 649x266px
| noexpand  = true
| titletext = 'Your chitin armor is no match for our iron-tipped stingers! Better go hide in your jars!' --common playground taunt
}}

==Explanation==
This comic and [[2771: College Knowledge]] are plays on the common playground rhyme which children will often recite when divided by gender is that "girls go to college to get more knowledge; boys go to {{w|Jupiter}} to get more stupider," also commonly heard as "Boys go to {{w|Mars}}, to get more candy bars; girls go to Jupiter, to get more stupider." The words "boys" and "girls" may be interchanged, depending on the gender of the person chanting (or how intelligent they are, for that matter). The schoolyard taunt embodies the competitiveness and separation commonly seen between young boys and girls, and ideas about the superiority of one's gender.

Starting out with this cadence, three characters (or child versions) {{w|Skipping rope|jump rope}} and explore parts of the solar system and beyond by taking it in turns to provide the rhythm's tempo. First [[Jill]] (who is turning the left end of the rope), then a [[Cueball]] (at the right), followed by a [[Ponytail]] (doing the jumping), before returning to Jill. As they concentrate on various stellar bodies that are harder and harder to rhyme, their chants become increasingly hesitant and obscure, ruining the rhythm, and resulting in ever more contrived "rhymes", to the point where they eventually seem compelled to abandon the whole game.

The title text refers back to some of the rhymes the characters mention, making sure to stay consistent with whichever gender acquires which object. Speaking from the perspective of the college-bound gender, who had acquired {{w|ferrous}} iron from {{w|Eris}} (or perhaps {{wiktionary|ferrous|become more composed of it}}, by {{w|Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed|bodily transformation}}), the girls playfully threaten the boys with iron-tipped {{w|stinger}}s, for which the boys' acquired armor of {{w|chitin}} (a material commonly found on the exoskeletons of various insects, including in any stings these might normally have) from {{w|Triton}} is purportedly no match. The girls then also refer to the jars which the boys had acquired from {{w|Mars}}, telling the boys that they'd better hide in them if they wanted any sort of protection from the iron-tipped stingers. To top it all off, the title text finally claims that this is supposedly a "common playground taunt" among children, which implies the unlikely outcome that the bizarre and unwieldy rhymes which the characters in the comic created have somehow persisted and passed into common usage enough to be generally recognizable.

In [[1202: Girls and Boys]], boys and girls both go to college ''and'' to Jupiter, both to get more knowledge.

==Notes==
*Going to Mars to get more jars may be a reference to a 1955 {{w|Burma-Shave}} campaign promising a free trip to Mars for whoever sent in 900 empty jars. The joking offer was accepted by a Wisconsin shopkeeper named Arliss French. The company enjoyed the publicity and sent him and his wife to {{w|Moers}}.
*{{w|Ceres (dwarf planet)|Ceres}} is a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
*{{w|Chitin}} is a polysaccharide found in the exoskeletons of insects and cell walls of fungi.
*{{w|Tim Berners-Lee}} is the inventor of the World Wide Web.
*{{w|Pamplemousse}} is the French word for grapefruit or pomelo, depending on dialect. Note that it does not actually rhyme with Betelgeuse for {{w|Betelgeuse#Spelling and pronunciation|most pronunciations}}, only when pronounced like ''Beetlejuice'' does this line's final syllable rhyme.
*It could be debated whether these are three children, and thus not Cueball and Ponytail, who are adult, but there is nothing to compare them to, and Jill has also been drawn as an adult. So, for ease of naming them, it is easier to keep the names even if these are children.

==Transcript==
:[Jill, Ponytail and Cueball are jumping rope while singing a common playground song. Jill and Cueball are swinging the ends of the rope, Ponytail is jumping in the middle facing Cueball on the right. The rope is going so fast around her that it is drawn with four thin gray lines, one over and one below her and two in between, so they form a kind of 3D ellipsoid shape around her. Small lines indicate the movement of the rope and the hands that hold it.]
:Jill: Girls go to college to get more knowledge
:Jill: Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider

:[Same scene but Ponytail is at a different moment in her jumping.]
:Cueball: Girls go to Ceres to get more theories
:Cueball: Boys go to Mars to get more jars

:[Same scene but Ponytail is at a different moment in her jumping.]
:Ponytail: Girls go to Eris to get more ferrous
:Ponytail: Boys go to Triton to get more chitin

:[The three have stopped playing so the rope is hanging from the hands of Jill and Cueball, running along the ground beneath Ponytail's feet. She is now just standing but has turned towards Jill.]
:Jill: Girls go to...Mercury...to...meet Tim Berners-Lee
:Jill: Boys go to... ...Betelgeuse...to get more... ...pamplemousse
:Cueball: I think we're done.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Jill]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring real people]] <!-- Tim Berners-Lee, as a lyrical mention -->
[[Category:Games]]
[[Category:Astronomy]]
[[Category:Food]]