Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Two more cartoons that came in this morning, entertained me, but presented some question as to whether I should in fact post them. They were both of a sort that I have posted about before: a Zippy with remarkable proper names, combining brand names, food names, names of real but obscure people, and/or words that merely entertain Bill Griffith (who is given to word enthusiasms); and a (Bizarro) cartoon noting (and illustrating) the fact that (most) characters in the comics don’t age over the years that tick past in the outside, non-comics world.

These are entirely suitable items for posting on this blog. The problem is that I’ve posted about these two topics again and again. so that it’s not clear to me that a new item of either type is worth posting, unless it presents some remarkable feature.

There’s a parallel in my postings about certain kinds of widespread linguistic phenomena: verbings, nounings, back-formations, portmanteaus, ambiguities, for example. Every so often I post to say that I do not propose to catalogue every instance of these phenomena — that would be an impossible task — so I ask people to send me only cases that seem in some way especially interesting.

Maybe it’s time to do the same for some comics-oriented topics. I’m not sure. In any case, here are the two I’ve been puzzling about.

1. Remarkable names in Zippy. The strip:

(#1)

The names aren’t the only features you might comment on (Judge Judy and Donald Trump turn up with some regularity), but they are remarkable. The list, plus some notes, not intended to be complete or authoritative:

Semolina Rottweiler [cf. Semolina Pilchard, from the Beatles song “I Am the Walrus”, and the object of  several lines of speculation],  Barbat Krazyglue [barbat is the name of a commercial product, but only in ZippyWorld], Nora Pilbeam [ah, you think, Harvard scholar of human evolution David Pilbeam, or one of a number of Pilbeam companies — but surely this is British stage and movie actress Nova Pilbeam], Parker Penpoint [a phrasal overlap portmanteau of Parker Pen and penpoint, I assume]

Griffith’s names draw you into murky zones of allusion and reference. We’ve been there many times

2. Ageless cartoon characters. This morning’s contribution to the topic is this Bizarro, on 24 years of Lisa Simpson:

(#2)

The Zippy characters are given to commenting on the agelessness phenomenon.

This entry was posted on May 26, 2014 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Names, This blogging life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.