Bill Griffith misfires on his Yiddish/Yinglish, and has Zippy producing SCHW-reduplication rather than the normative SCHM-reduplication:
I somehow missed this in my comics feed, but got it in e-mail from Danny Bloom, who posted it in his blog. Bloom wrote Griffith, who understood immediately, saying in reply, “BLOOM! SCHMOOM!”
August 18, 2009 at 5:36 pm |
Great headline. I envision a future ZIPPY strip, in say, 2045, 3 panels, with Griffy saying “Albert, Schmalbert!”
Followed by panel 2 with Zippy saying: “Einstein, Schmeinstein!”
followed by panel 3 with Griffy intoning: Relativity, Schmelativity!
the artwork i leave to Mr Griffith’s heirs…..
(I’ve been a fan of the strip since 1999….. and i must admit the first time i read the “Cyber Insecurity” strip above on august 15, i did NOT see the mistake, because i was reading fast at the local grocery store where I pick up the daily paper. Later, at home, reading the paper again SLOWLY on my sofa while watching CNN, I looked at the strip again, and then my eyes had time and energy to FOCUS and I said, wait a minute, SCHWINDLE, that can’t be right! At first, i thought Mr Griffith maybe was inferring that Kindle was a swindle…but when i got the Twitter, schwitter, i know there was something funny going on here in the funny pages……. so i asked Bill if he was aware of the blooper, and he wasn’t at first……it must have been totally unconcious on his part, because he knows his Yiddish inflections well and has used them before in ZIPPY. But this time a few neuons misfired. That strip of 8-15 will become a collector’s item, no? And be worth zillions on the comic market in the future. Zippy Schmippy indeed. Leo Rosten must be having a good laff at this too. All in fun, of course. Zippy remains my favorite comic bar none.