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As for this comic…

This comic text took me quite a while to compose, for obvious reasons. Now, to be clear, my exposure to the Jamaican diaspora is (in my humble opinion) a bit more robust than your average Canadian white guy. I grew up with some Jamaican friends when I was a kid. I’ve had a number of Jamaican friends over my adult life too. Heck, I even lived with a Jamaican family for a whole year in Oakville. I am a regular at the Jamaican Patty Shack in the Hamilton Farmer’s Market. That is to say, I know many Jamaicans, but I definitely do not know Jamaicans well enough to assume a convincing patois. Snow I am not.

Thankfully, a number of Jamaicans have created numerous online resources for this sort of occasion. Particularly helpful were resources detailing the sorts of things that Jamaican mothers regularly say, because Jamaican mothers are legendary (along with Italian mothers, Chinese mothers, Irish mothers, and … well, I guess most mothers are legendary the world over). So what Tyler’s mother says from panel three onward has been carefully assembled from reasonably reliable sources and is the result of entertaining research.

The idea, by the way, is that Tyler’s mother only lapses into her patois when she’s super angry. This quirk has been mentioned before in a previous comic but we finally get to see it in action now.

And yes, as a few readers anticipated, Tyler’s mother does not respect his desire to change his name to ‘Tyler’ after the white chicks’ hostile ‘Taylor’ name takeover of ’05. You called it.