Honh honh honh

Between Friends, 5/24/24

For my sins, I must occasionally fulfill my oath and keep you up to date on the Between Friends gals, so: the dark-haired Between Friends gal is working temporarily in Paris, and has a flirty relationship with her boss Benoit and a weirdly antagonistic relationship with her coworker Louise, and today we're finding out why. I bring all this up because, maybe I'm crazy, but I find the phrasing in panel two here very weird? Like: do I think your wife's sister's daughter is your niece? Absolutely. Would I still call her your niece if you and your wife got divorced? More of a grey area, but I still think of my dad's brother's ex-wife, who I'm friends with on Facebook, as my aunt, and they've been divorced for 20 years, so it's not unreasonable. But the formulation "his niece on his ex-wife's side!" just seems deranged and unnatural to me. Do we have nieces and nephews on ... sides? I am imagining her co-worker here saying it in a really heavy French accent and then explaining what he thinks it means. "'Niece' is what you say in English for a woman you're sleeping with who isn't your wife, non? And 'on your wife's side' means your wife knows about it? My English is, how you say, not so good."

Dennis the Menace, 5/24/24