Arnold Zwicky's Blog

The One Big Happy in my comics feed this morning (apparently from August 23rd):

(#1)

Here, Ruthie doesn’t know (or has forgotten) the precise lexical item turban, so she uses figurative language to get a descriptive term. To understand this, you need to know about Jiffy Pop, of course.

From Wikipedia:

Jiffy Pop is a popcorn brand of ConAgra Foods. The product combines popcorn kernels, oil, and flavoring agents with a heavy-gauge aluminum foil pan and expandable, light-gauge aluminum foil cover. As the pan is heated, the popping corn causes the cover foil to unfold and puff up. “Jiffy” in the name alludes to the short cooking time.

Frederick C. Mennen of LaPorte, Indiana, a chemist, inventor and industrialist, is credited with developing the product in 1958. Mennen began marketing Jiffy Pop in 1959.

Jiffy Pop in its expanded, or turban-like state:

(#2)

I have a very clear memory of Jiffy Pop from my high school years (maybe earlier than that), but that can’t be right, since the stuff didn’t come on the market until after I graduated from high school. Memory is a tricky, unreliable thing.

For comparison to #2:

(#3)

Manmohan Singh, the former Prime Minister of India, wearing a Sikh turban. The turban is one of the most recognized symbols of the Sikh community.

This entry was posted on September 24, 2016 at 6:02 pm and is filed under Figurative language, Linguistics in the comics, Memory, Typography. 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.