2043

This is the kind of comic that is so stupid, so lazy, and so monumentally insulting that it reaffirms the necessity of our mission here. It fails on every conceivable level, and yet Randall remains smugly, complacently convinced that he has yet again brought forth a beautiful pearl of genius.

The basic premise is that you can generalize a taxonomy from words for things that contain other things. In the first place, it's the equivalent of this:

In other words, a stupid-ass concept all the way to its foundations

In the second place, Randall is completely wrong about the operating principle! A houseboat is NOT "a boat that holds a house", it's a house that is also a boat! You can tell the difference by asking yourself if it's possible to take the house out of the boat. You can't, because then it's no longer a boat either. A boathouse, at least, is a house that holds a boat. But then this puts us in the position of Randall once again trying to generalize a category from examples that didn't goddamn work in the first place.

So it shouldn't be surprising that, having failed to establish this pattern, Randall goes on to screw up its applications. A boat trailer is not a car that holds a boat (it is in fact not a car at all*). An apartment is not a house that holds houses (it is in fact not a house at all**). A mobile home is not a car that holds a house (it is in fact not a car at all***). Maybe you could make a case for tow trucks, garages, and car ferries, but by this point I am no longer inclined to cooperate. By God, XKCD still sucks.




*You can tell because it doesn't have its own engine.
**You can tell because you can't physically remove individual units from an apartment building and still have both a complete unit and an apartment building. I will only note in passing that what Randall actually wrote in his idiotic table was "apartment", and not "apartment building", so we are forced to assume even that.
***You can tell because mobile homes and RVs are not the same things.