Strange Windows: Keeping Up with the Goonses (part 6)

This is part six of our look at comics, cartoons and language– today focusing on panel and editorial cartoons

“When I saw them together at the beach, that’s when the light bulb switched on: they were having an affair!


 

The origin of this metaphor– the light bulb moment– for a sudden realisation or a bright idea, I’ve been unable to pin down– but it definitely comes from comics. Note that the newspaper comic strip and the electric light bulb both came about around the same time…

However, another fine old comic strip depiction– that of sawing wood to indicate snoring:
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Strange Windows: Keeping up with the Goonses (part 5)

This is part five of our look at comics, cartoons and language– today focusing on the comic book

Art by Don Newton and Alfredo Alcala

“Jeff and Tom are an item? Isn’t that cradle-robbing?”

“Oh, total Batman and Robin, you know.”

That same online gay and LGBTglossary consulted in part 4 gives the following definitions:

BATMAN AND ROBIN
(n., adj.)

1. Inseparable.
2. A leader and his sidekick.
3. Daddy-Son relationship; an older man with a younger lover.

This last usage chimes with Dr Frederick Wertham’s warnings about the Caped Crusader and the Boy Wonder.

Dr Wertham, struck speechless by the sheer depravity of comic books

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Strange Windows: Keeping up with the Goonses (part 4)

And on to comic books, in part four of our series on language 

from the comics and cartoons!

“No, I haven’t finished clearing out the barn! I’m up to my eyeballs in chores– I’m not Superman, you know.”

Art by Joe Shuster

The creators of the Superman comics character didn’t invent the word ‘superman’, but its etymological trail is interesting in itself– again, comics set up a new usage for it.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzche (1844– 1900) coined the word Uebermensch to decribe what he thought to be the necessary next step in the evolution of mankind.                                                                                  

He famously defined the Human (Mensch) as a rope between the Ape (Affe) and the Superman (Uebermensch).

Nietzsche himself became a comics character; art by Maximilien Leroy, after a script by Michel Onfray.

The word ‘Uebermensch’ translates literally as ‘above human being’.

Nietzche’s first English- language translator, Alexander Tille, rendered it as ‘Beyond-man’; but in 1909, Thomas Common translated it by taking the Latin root ‘super‘, meaning above or over, and added the Anglo-saxon ‘man‘.

Here is an extract from an English version of Nietzche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus spake Zarathustra):

And Zarathustra spake thus unto the

people:

Behold, I teach you the Superman!

The Superman is the meaning of the earth.

Let your will say:

The Superman shall be the meaning of the earth!

Once,blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died, and therewith also those blasphemers.

To blaspheme the earth is now the dreadfulest sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth!

Verily, a polluted stream is man. One must be a sea to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.

Behold, I teach you the Superman: He is that sea.
Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue?
Where is the madness against which you should be inoculated?
Behold, I teach you the Superman:
He is this lightning, he is this madness!

Whew.

Next time, Friedrich, stick to the decaff.

“Sieh –Da! Dort oben im Himmel!” ” Es ist ein Vogel.” “Es ist ein Flugzeug!”
Nein– es ist UEBERMENSCH !!!

The idea was taken up by much of the intelligentsia of the late 19th century,and mixed with the ideas of Darwinism and Spencerism.

The ‘superman’ translation was popularised by the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw in his play, ‘Man and Superman‘, which actually predates Common’s usage by several years.

By the 1930s, a far more sinister twist on the superman concept accompanied the rise to power of the Nazis in Germany.

As part of their racist agenda, they talked about breeding a ‘master race’ of supermen.

To the Ubermensch they now contrasted the Untermensch, or sub-human, to be enslaved or destroyed.

A young Ohio science-fiction fan, Jerry Siegel (1914–1996), became fascinated by the idea of the superman, then much-discussed.

In 1933, in the pages of his mimeographed fanzine ‘Science Fiction‘, he published the short story ‘The Reign of the Superman‘ with illustrations by his friend Joe Shuster (1914– 1992):

In this tale, the Superman is a force for evil; as a Jew, Siegel understood the implications of Nazi philosophy.

(The Nazis were well aware of the Superman comic, and they viewed it with emotions varying from amused contempt– the magazine of the S.S.,Signal, published a nasty but witty takedown of the strip– to rage, apparently Goering’s reaction.)

Siegel and Shuster reworked the concept into a comic-strip; note, in this early version, that they retain the definite article: The Superman.

It was finally published as a comic book in 1938– and the rest is history.

Nowadays, we use the term ‘superman’ generally in an ironic sense.

In addition, the popularity of the Superman character has given rise to the use of ‘super‘ as an intensifier. Shops offer us ‘super savings‘, for example; since 1944, a superpower is a state with overwhelming military or economic superiority over other countries; where Hollywood once had mere stars, it now has superstars.

(Contrast this with the traditional use of the ‘super’ prefix keeping its sense of ‘above’ or ‘over’, as in supervise, supersede, superfluous, superannuated, etc.)

In Britain, “Super!‘ became an exclamation of admiration on the order of “Great!” or “Terrific!”

We’ve come a long way from Nietzche! And, in fact, when the latter’s work is discussed by scholars today in English, the untranslated term Ubermensch is used.

In the 1950s, a new translation by Walter Kaufman introduced the term ‘overman’;  Kaufman fumed bitterly at how ‘superman’ had been co-opted by Pop culture. Wie schade!

“Perhaps they calculated that winning health care would strengthen them for climate change, like Popeye after a helping of spinach. But the political effect, at least in its immediate manifestations, was more like kryptonite.”Hendrick Hertzberg, The New Yorker, Feb 7  2011.

Of course, Superman has a dread weakness: the mineral kryptonite is deadly to him.

(Green kryptonite, that is; as every scholar knows, there are five colors of kryptonite, each with different properties. I publish the following guide as a public service for today’s woefully ignorant youth:)

(Interestingly, kryptonite originated not in the comic, but on the popular Superman radio show.)

That same radio show also gave birth to expressions such as ‘faster than a speeding bullet’ and ‘Up, up and away!‘)

Kryptonite’s powers are so famously dangerous to the Man of Steel that the word has passed into common speech to indicate something strongly repellent.

Art by Wayne Boring and Charles Paris

The Kryptonite line of bicycle locks is supposed to deter thieves, for example:

” John’s a fairly good student, but his sister Anne is the real brainiac of the family–chess club, computer club, honors roll…”

Art by Curt Swan and Stan Kaye

One of Superman’s deadliest foes is the evil android Brainiac, a super-genius, first appearing in 1958.

Brainiac is also high-school slang for an exceptionally intelligent student.

Did the slang term come from the comic book? The jury’s out on this one.

Brainiac was also the name of a kit computer for students, introduced in 1956; the name obviously derives from early computers such as Univac.

Now, in the panel below, note the strange caption at the bottom.

Art by Curt Swan and George Klein

‘Brainiac is also a trademark registered by Berkely Enterprises, Inc, manufacturers of the famous “Brainiac Computer Kit.” See Metropolis Mailbag, in this issue, for details.– Editor’

What happened? Berkely Enterprises, the manufacturer of the Brainiac kit, made some nasty legal overtures to DC Comics over trademark infringement.

The publisher managed to soothe the irate computer-maker with a nice dollop of free publicity.

So — did the ‘brainiac‘ appellation come from the computer or from the comic?

I’ll bet on the latter (and so will the dictionaries)… but who knows for certain?

(For the full story, go to Brian Cronin’s thorough reporting here, my source for this usage.)

“It’s some kind of bizarro flu bug– my doctor can’t make head nor tail of it”

The use of bizarro as an adjective dates to the early 1970s, though the comic-book Bizarro and his Bizarro World came about in the 1950s in the pages of Superman; the Bizarros had their own series in Adventure Comics.

Art by John Forte

On Bizarro World, everything is backwards, according to the Bizarro creed:

Did the slang use come from the comic, or is it just an extension of the word “bizarre” — as ‘weirdo’ is from ‘weird’?

Probably the latter– although the Bizarros became prominent when championed by their fan Jerry Seinfeld on his hit T.V. show, Seinfeld, in the ’90s:

Elaine: “He’s reliable. He’s considerate. He’s like your exact opposite.”

Jerry: “So he’s Bizarro Jerry.

Elaine: “Bizarro Jerry?”

Jerry: “Yeah, like Bizarro Superman, Superman’s exact opposite, who lives in the backwards Bizarro world. Up is down, down is up, he says hello when he leaves, goodbye when he arrives.”

Elaine: “Shouldn’t he say badbye? Isn’t that the opposite of goodbye?”

Jerry: “No, it’s still goodbye.”

— from the Seinfeld episode, ‘Bizarro Jerry”

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“I love the microwave oven. You press a button, and shazam! Instant cooked dinner.”

Superman’s big rival was Captain Marvel, ‘the World’s Mightiest Mortal’ — who actually outsold the Man of  Steel in the 1940s; this irked National (DC), Superman’s publisher, who sued its upstart rival out of existence.

Captain Marvel’s alter-ego, Billy Batson, transformed into the superstrong ‘Big Red Cheese’ by shouting a magic acronym formed from the names of Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles and Mercury:  SHAZAM!

Superman figure by Murphy Anderson; Billy 

Batson and Captain Marvel by C.C.Beck

 

 

(The above cover shows that rivals can kiss and  make up; in 1972 DC leased Captain Marvel from its owner, Fawcett Publications.)

At any rate, ‘Shazam!‘ became a magic formula, akin to ‘abracadabra’, hinting at an instant transformation.  The  word got a big boost in the 1960s as the favorite exclamation of T.V.’s Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C,  acted by Jim Nabors, and in the 1970s from the Shazam! kid’s television  show.

“Nine o’clock already? Holy Moley! My wife’s gonna kill me!”

Captain Marvel’s own favorite exclamation was ‘Holy Moley!‘ I was surprised to find that this now-common idiom, which I thought predated the comic, apparently originated with it.

Cover by C.C.Beck

It’s possible the editors at Fawcett didn’t want to use the common ‘Holy Cow!’,’ Holy Mackerel!’ or ‘Holy Smokes!’, aware of their blasphemous connotations (the first two insulting the Virgin Mary, the third insulting the Holy Ghost), and thus elected to invent their own meaningless but euphonic utterance.

“If I were you, I’d stay as far away from the police as possible. What do you think they’d say when they saw that outfit, Mary Marvel?” — John Kennedy

Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

Captain Marvel had a little sister:

Art by Jack Binder Studio

To understand the quote from the Toole novel, consider the scene: the hero, Ignatius O’Reilly, has been forced into a job selling hot dogs, and has to wear a ridiculously camp pirate costume. The speaker of the quote is a Gay man taunting him about his outfit. But why ‘Mary Marvel’?

I go online to a dictionary of Gay and LGBT slang, and find this on the use of ‘Mary’:

1. An effeminate homosexual male, as used by other homosexuals to affectionately

“nickname” him. The term is very widely used, sometimes mockingly (indeed,

perhaps, “self-mockingly”). It is a greeting “Mary! How are you, dear?

In its adj. form, “Is she ever mary,” it states that the male

homosexual is very feminine. It is also the one word that “slips out” when a

homosexual is vexed with himself or what he is trying to do; instead of,

perhaps, “O damn…!” it’s “Mary…!”.

2. A male homosexual who takes the passive, feminine role.

3. A lesbian.

4. A woman – no negative connotations.

5. (gayle slang) Obvious homosexual man.

6. A term of endearment or greeting: “Hi Mary!”. Also, a standard camp

name used by gay men to refer to each other.

It seems to me that “ Mary Marvel” is a variant on simple “Mary”, and that definition number 1 applies here.

A Gay friend informs me that the usage is now obsolete, but the same doesn’t apply to a certain Dynamic Duo’s place in Gay terminology… as we shall see in part 5 — where we also encounter the Lone Ranger, Vladimir Putin, Baby Huey, Dr Wertham, Alfred E. Neuman, Tubby, Wikileaks, and Zippy the Funny Pinhead .

Be there– or be square!

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This is part four of a seven part series; click here for part 1, part 2 and  part 3, dealing with American newspaper comic strips; part 5 , like this part, looks at comic books; while  part 6 concerns gag panels and editorial cartoons; part 7 covers British cartoons; and there’s an index.

I would like to have a part 8, consisting of French, Italian, and other European colloquial languages enriched by their cartoons.

If you have any suggestions for cartoon-derived idioms along the above lines, please mention them in comments– or e-mail me at the yahoo dot com address alexbuchet

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An incredibly massive resource for research on comic books is The Grand Comicbook Database. Lots of cover eye candy in addition to information on over 200 000 comic books.
Brian Cronin’s charming column, Comic Book Urban Legends, features thousands of offbeat facts; much of it is superhero trivia, but he also speaks of strips and panel cartoons. Many thanks for his info on the Brainiac affair.
The online gay and LGBTglossary is my source for the Mary Marvel material. A window into a robust and expressive jargon.

Strange Windows: Keeping up with the Goonses (part 3)

This is part three of our look at comics’ contributions to colloquial English.

Another prolific contributor to the language was Al Capp, creator of the strip Li’l Abner.

“My Mom and Dad met when she picked him out at a Sadie Hawkins dance.”

Sadie Hawkins is one of Capp’s memorable characters; she first appeared in November 1937, and until the mid-50s, November was known as Sadie Hawkins month and became an unofficial collegiate holiday.

Hawkins was the ugly daughter of the most wealthy and powerful man in town and was avoided by all the town’s men.

Hawkins’ father lined up all eligible males and shot off his gun. When the gun was fired, they ran for their lives and their freedom from matrimony.

click image to enlarge

The gunshot signaled the unwed women to enter the race and try to catch a man. When an unlucky male was brought back, kicking and screaming, he had no choice but to marry the woman. Thus was born a Dogpatch annual tradition: Sadie Hawkins Day.

Capp also came up with the idea for a Sadie Hawkins dance — a dance where only the ladies picked their partners.

The craze spread throughout the ’40s and ’50s, and continues today.


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Strange Windows: Keeping Up with the Goonses (part 2)

Jeep! Jeep!

This is part two of our survey of language spawned by comics and cartoons.

Here’s a strip that, in comics, is one of the richest contributors to the language: Thimble Theatre, better known worldwide by the name of its protagonist, the sailor Popeye.

The strip’s creator, Elzie Segar (1894– 1938) is credited with several coinages, some of which are contested; let’s take them one by one.

“With a loanshark, it’s simple: you don’t pay, he sends one of his goons to break your leg“.

To Segar is generally attributed the word “goon”, but the truth is a bit more complex; the word long predated the strip.

However, it is arguable that Segar changed the sense of this slang term. Before, it designated a foolish simpleton.

But by the end of the thirties, after Segar introduced the fearsome but lovable Alice the Goon into the strip:

click image to enlarge

… the meaning changed to that of a hulking, violent thug.
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Strange Windows:Keeping up with the Goonses (part 1)

Art by Rube Goldberg

As you raise spoon of soup (A) to your mouth it pulls string (B), thereby jerking ladle (C) which throws cracker (D) past parrot (E). Parrot jumps after cracker and perch (F) tilts, upsetting seeds (G) into pail (H). Extra weight in pail pulls cord (I), which opens and lights automatic cigar lighter (J), setting off sky-rocket (K) which causes sickle (L) to cut string (M) and allow pendulum with attached napkin to swing back and forth thereby wiping off your chin. After the meal, substitute a harmonica for the napkin and you’ll be able to entertain the guests with a little music.

“Fred’s neighbor buys a jeep, so of course Fred buys a Hummer. I zap him with ‘Keeping up with the Joneses, eh, Freddy?’ He was steamed up, but he doesn’t scare me. The palooka may be built like a goon, but he’s more Caspar Milquetoast than Superman.

The ocean of the English language is fed by many rivers, and some of the main streams are those of popular media.

Movies, television, songs, theater, vaudeville, books, radio… all have created uncounted idioms, words, catch-phrases and phatic utterances.

Cartoons and comics have contributed their own rich share:

The comic-strip artist[…]has been a very diligent maker of terse and dramatic words.

–H.L. Mencken, The American Language

In this column we’ll review a sampling of these colorful idioms.

Part one of the five-part series focusses on American English from the early newspaper comic strips and cartoons.

Along the way, however, we’ll debunk some false etymology. And because, at times, cartoons have  influenced a word’s meaning without creating the word itself, we’ll also take note of such ambiguous cases. Most examples were invented by me, but if attributed they’re actual quotations.

We’ll kick off with a look at a man who was one of the most famous cartoonists of his day; although his life and work are now obscure, his coinages live on in the vernacular: Thomas Aloycious Dorgan (1877 – 1929), who signed his work Tad.

click image to enlarge

W. J. Funk, of the Funk and Wagnall’s dictionary company, placed Dorgan at the top of the list of the ten “most fecund makers of American slang.”

Tad is generally credited with either creating or popularizing such words and expressions as dumbbell (a stupid person; see cartoon above); for crying out loud (a cry of exasperation); cat’s meow and cat’s pajamas (as superlatives); applesauce (nonsense); cheaters (eyeglasses); skimmer (a boater hat); hard-boiled ( for a tough person); drugstore cowboy (loafers or ladies’ men); nickel-nurser (a miser); as busy as a one-armed paperhanger (overworked); Yes, we have no bananas, which became a popular song, still heard today; Twenty-three, Skidoo, (let’s get out of here); and dogs for shoes.

However, he is best-remembered today for coining the word “hot dog” for the frankfurter sandwich that appeared at the turn of the century.

Nathan’s of Coney Island, birthplace of the hot dog. The establishment is still there, and the nosh is still great.

Alas! This appears to be a case of faux folk etymology.

Supposedly, Tad had drawn a cartoon of a dachsund between two buns and christened it the Hot Dog– as in this modern re-creation:

However, no trace of this cartoon has ever been found in Tad’s works. The term probably came from common jokes about dog meat being inserted into cheap sausages.

This term for a sausage served on a bun got its start in college slang in the 1890s. The first known (printed)  use of the term is in the Knoxville Journal (Tennessee) on 28 September 1893:

“It was so cool last night that the appearance of overcoats was common…Even the weinerwurst men began preparing to get the “hot dogs” ready for sale Saturday night.

From the Yale Record of 19 Oct 1895:

“They contentedly munched hot dogs during the whole service.

Two weeks earlier, on 5 October, that same paper recorded a poem, “Echoes From The Lunch Wagon”:

“‘Tis dogs’ delight to bark and bite
Thus does the adage run.
But I delight to bite the dog
When placed inside the bun.”

No Tad in sight in hot-dog land… but he was still a mighty coiner of words!

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We are on firmer ground tracing how a cartoon led to the naming of a much-beloved toy:

President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt was an ardent big-game hunter. One day in Mississipi, the game was scarce. Some of Roosevelt’s aides captured an old she-bear and tied it to a tree for the President to shoot. Roosevelt, disgusted by this lack of sportsmanship, refused.

The cartoonist Clifford Berryman was inspired by this anecdote to draw in 1902 the above cartoon, “drawing the line in Mississipi”. It was immensely successful and was copied the nation over.

Berryman began inserting a bear into any cartoon featuring Roosevelt, but changing it from an adult to a cub:

A shopkeeper, Morris Michtom, took two stuffed bear dolls made by his wife and put them in his shop window.
Michtom asked for permission from President Roosevelt to call them “Teddy’s bears”. ( His store eventually became the Ideal Novelty and Toy Company.) And thus was born the teddy bear.

That’s just one example of cartoon to toy to language.

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“With her apple cheeks and sweet smile she’s as cute as a kewpie doll.”

The Kewpies (derived from ‘Cupid’) were  the angelic babies featured from 1909 in the  magazine Ladies’ Home Journal, the creation of cartoonist and illustrator Rose O’Neill (1874– 1954):

In 1912 O’Neill licensed production of dolls based on her characters, thus creating one of the most successful toys in history.

Rose O’Neill surrounded by Kewpie dolls

A ‘kewpie doll’  look referred to  women who were pretty in a chubby, childlike way; it wasn’t always a compliment. (Animated cartoon star Betty Boop  owed a lot of her design to the kewpies.)

At carnival fairgrounds, kewpie dolls were frequent prizes at shooting galleries and other games. Hence the sarcastic expression ‘You win the kewpie doll’ when someone guesses  an answer correctly.

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“Jim’s neighbor has a tennis court, so of course Jim has to install a swimming pool — he’s just keeping up with the Joneses.”

This popular expression denoting envy- motivated consumption comes from the title of Arthur R. “Pop” Morand‘s strip chronicling the life of the McGinis family. These upwardly mobile middle-class denizens occasionally referred to their neighbours, the Jones family, with envy or anxiety in their constant war to one-up them:

Interestingly, the Joneses never appeared in the strip named for them.

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“The staples of old yellow journalism are the staples of the new yellow journalism: sex, crime; and, even better, sex crime.” —Nick Denton, Gawker founder

In the 1890’s, there was a fierce commercial war between two popular New York papers: Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. They competed with sensationalist stories, eye-catching illustrations, and an innovation that was to spread to every newspaper in the land: the Sunday color comic-strip supplement.

One of the first regular cartoons to appear in the World was Hogan’s Alley by R.F. Outcault (1863– 1928), featuring comic vignettes of the slums.

The hero of the cartoon soon came to be a rascally urchin called ‘The Yellow Kid’:

Hearst lured Outcault and his cartoon away from the World; Pulitzer sued; the upshot was that Pulitzer continued Hogan’s Alley, now drawn by George Luks, while Hearst published Outcault’s version under the title The Yellow Kid.

The traditional press looked on these vulgar papers with distaste. In an 1897 article in the New York Press, veteran newsman Ervin Wardman attacked Pulitzer and Hearst for their “yellow kid journalism”. Shortened to yellow journalism, the phrase still designates sensationalist, populist media reporting, whether in print or on the air… or on the Internet.

” The entire filing system has to be fixed — as it is, it’s as screwed up as Hogan’s goat.”

Outcault’s strip also gave rise to an expression especially popular in the Armed forces, particularly the Navy.

Hogan’s Alley had a smelly, bad-tempered goat in residence.

Any situation that is seriously fouled-up is said to be as f—ed up as Hogan’s Goat.

However, another famous Outcault creation– Buster Brown— was not, as some say, the source of the nickname and epithet ‘Buster’, which had existed years before he drew the strip.

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“Wimps, I think; milquetoast souls who cough if someone is smoking across the street, who wear cardigans and bicycle clips; for god’s sake, if you’re so delicate, move to an ashram!”

George Michelsen Foy, Zero Decibels

The disparaging word (noun and adjective) “milquetoast“,  evoking weak-tea wimpiness and pusillanimity, comes to us from Caspar Miquetoast, the pathologically shy and timorous ” hero”,  courtesy of H.T. Webster (1885 – 1953),  of the weekly comic panel,  ‘The Timid Soul‘.  Milquetoast:  it’s a word often used for so-called  “henpecked” husbands in the Walter Mitty vein.

“Voters in this election were almost all polled at saying they were sick and tired of milquetoast congressmen: they wanted rebels with the guts to challenge the status quo”.

As my composite example attests, it has been trotted out repeatedly in the 2010 midterm congressional election: google “milquetoast politician/congressman” for examples.

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“He spent the whole vacation complaining about the weather and worrying about the cost; it’s no fun having a gloomy Gus as a travelling companion.”

The appellation gloomy Gus for a depressed, pessimistic individual comes from Frederic Burr Opper (1857 — 1937)’s strip Happy Hooligan. Gus was one of the brothers of the hobo title character, and indeed he was in a perpetual state of  gloom; ironically, he always fared better than the optimistic Happy or the pretentious other brother, Montmorency, in their calamitous adventures.

Copyright registration for a Gloomy Gus doll.

In the panel below, Gus is at far left, next to Montmorency with Happy at the kissing booth at right.

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“Enter a haunted house? After you, my dear Alphonse!

Another Opper strip gave us a lasting idiom: Alphonse and Gaston. It was a one-gag concept, featuring two Frenchmen who would waste time insisting, with preposterous courtesy, on the other’s precedence even in the direst situations.

A situation where neither side will take the first step in concerted action is often called an Alphonse- and- Gaston situation:

“Both Democrats and Republicans agree the budget must be reduced, but neither party wants to be seen cutting popular programs such as Medicare; thus the Alphonse-and- Gaston standoff in the House.”

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“One of the FBI interrogation techniques is the old Mutt-and-Jeff routine taught by Army intelligence.”– Washington Post, 30 August 1964

Mutt and Jeff was an immensely popular strip by Bud Fischer (1884 — 1954), featuring the adventures of a comically mismatched duo of friends, tall Mutt and small Jeff:

This physical disparity ensured that any pair of height-mismatched companions in America would be dubbed “Mutt and Jeff”.

The two differed in character, too.  Mutt fancied himself a sharp operator, quick with schemes to turn a fast buck, preferably at the racetrack. Jeff was a  gentle soul, something of an innocent, whose unworldliness would frequently derail unwittingly his compadre’s latest scheme, to the latter’s exasperation.

In police slang,  the “good cop/bad cop” interrogation technique was logically dubbed a Mutt-and-Jeff routine

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“First you think we’ll miss the plane, then you’re afraid it’s overbooked– honestly, you’re such a worry wart!

Art by J.R. Williams

From 1922, the cartoon panel Out our Way, drawn by J.R. Williams (1888– 1957)  celebrated the foibles of life in small- town America. A recurring character was the boy dubbed  the Worry Wart, because he created so many worries among others. When worry wart entered the language about 1956, the sense had shifted to one given to excessive worrying.

(Another Williams catch-phrase much beloved of my mommy was “Why mothers get gray“, trotted out at any egregiously foolish conduct on my part.)

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“He set up his own pump-and-filter system cobbled out of  reclaimed junkyard parts;  I’ve never seen such a crazy Rube Goldberg contraption.

Sometimes it’s the cartoonist who gives his name to the idiom.

Rube Goldberg (1883 — 1970), a prolific cartoonist with a long career, is best remembered for his designs of insanely complicated machines, made of ridiculous parts, to accomplish trivial feats like knocking on a door or catching a mouse.

Here’s Goldberg’s idea of an alarm clock:

Any over-complicated,  jury-rigged machine or system is apt to be tagged a Rube Goldberg contraption. ( We also refer to bureaucratic systems of insanely complex red tape as Rube Goldberg systems.)

I recall, as a child, being inspired by these cartoons (and by the Goldberg-derived game ‘MouseTrap‘ — does anyone else remember that?) to build my own nutty contraptions.  I’ll wager Goldberg inspired many a future inventor or engineer.

Since 1949, Purdue University has run the Rube Goldberg Machine Competition, where contestants are assigned a simple task to be carried out by a machine; the most absurdly complicated machine wins.

At the 2007 competition, this device was for pouring orange juice into a glass:


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This was part 1 of a seven-part weekly series. In part 2, we’ll cover the great age of the comic strip…from Popeye to the Dragon Lady and beyond!

See you in the funny pages!

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This is part one of a seven part series; click here for part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6,part 7 and an index.

Part 3 concludes our look at strips; parts 4 and 5  cover the comic book; part 6, gag and editorial cartoons; part 7, British and Commonwealth cartoons; and I would like to have a part 8, consisting of French, Italian, and other European colloquial languages enriched by their cartoons.

Friends–I need your help!

If you have any suggestions for cartoon-derived idioms along the above lines, please mention them in comments– or e-mail me at the yahoo dot com address alexbuchet

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Here are some useful and interesting online resources for language:
The Online Etymological Dictionary, an exhaustive source of word and phrase origins.
The blog wordorigins tracks current and historic words; its index of words and phrases The Big List is guaranteed to keep you riveted for hours.
The lively blog Language Log features witty and perceptive contributions from linguists. They keep a special watch on cartoons and comics.
A wonderful source for information on classic comic strips is Don Markstein’s Toonopedia, and another is the famous Lambiek encyclopedia of cartoonists. The two are complementary.

Oh, and congratulations to Craig Yoe and Clizia Gussoni on the birth of their son Griffin! Mazel Tov!