Which dialect of English uses “news” as a discrete noun like this? “A news” is ungrammatical to me, so this is either wrong or an innovation I’m not aware of.
What is weird here, either way, is how “new” is generally an adjective, but “news” is a specific plural noun form of it, suggesting that “a new” ought to be grammatical, and indeed perhaps a conjugation for this comic, but that doesn’t sound right to me either.
“A news item” would be the most correct here, I think.
See also: goods.
Every time I read shitty, dreadful news.
If your not familiar with English, the present and past tense of read is spelled the same.
I read shitty news (pronounced red - past tense)
I read shitty news (pronouced reed - current tense)
The speech bubble has “Every time I read a shitty dreadful news”.
There may be some confusion because I took out the adjectives, which don’t change the surrounding grammar at all. They change the semantics somewhat, but this is about grammar, not the meaning. This then reduces to “Every time I read a news”, and then further to the particle “a news”, which, again, does not change the original syntax of that fragment.
My point was that such usage is invalid in the standard varieties of English I’m aware of.
I are of understanding what the author intended, just like you understood the start of this sentence, but it doesn’t mean that it’s standard form. Which, ultimately, is why I asked if there’s a form of English where it is correct.
(Tangentially, I do need to work on softening the way I word my comments. That’s an ongoing struggle.)
Some languages apparently don’t have countable nouns.
Some languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, treat all nouns as mass nouns, and need to make use of a noun classifier (see Chinese classifier) to add numerals and other quantifiers.
Could be that the artist speaks one of those.
EDIT: And not all languages have the definite/indefinite article distinction in English. I’ve seen some Russian-language speakers in particular have trouble with that.
EDIT2: It sounds like the artist was born in Russia prior to emigrating to the US, so I’d guess that he might speak Russian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shen_(cartoonist)
Shen (also known as Shenanigansen) is the pen name of cartoonist Andrew Tsyaston, the creator of the comic series Owlturd, Shen Comix, and Bluechair, and the co-creator of Live with Yourself!.
Born: Andrew Tsyaston February 1, 1992 (age 34)
Shen emigrated from Europe to the United States with his family in 1999.[3][4]
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/Shen
Shen (aka Shenanigansen / Andrew Tsyaston) is an Russian-born American webcomic creator.
So he’s probably been speaking English for a long time, though he would probably have been speaking Russian until he was seven.
EDIT3: I’m not gonna try to track down the exact date of publication, but the earliest copy Tineye has seen is from 2020, so I doubt that it’s a really old comic from when he was a lot younger.
EDIT4: It’s a modified version of the original comic, so the text isn’t from the original artist:
https://x.com/shenanigansen/status/1280119418496921600
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/a85692c7-62e0-4b22-a733-62ba4a02b54b.jpeg
