Arnold Zwicky's Blog

A Benjamin Schwartz cartoon in the latest (February 13th/20th) New Yorker:

The German folk tale of Snow White provides the basis for this name play, though the published version of the story by the Brothers Grimm didn’t name the dwarfs who help Snow White. The modern names entered pop culture with the 1937 Disney animated film. At which point they provided an inventory of names to play with (supplementing another source of pop culture names, the names of Santa’s eight reindeer from “A Visit From St. Nicholas”).

The first five of Schwartz’s dwarfs continue the tradition of naming them for physical, personality, or behavioral characteristics, but with more modern vocabulary (I’m especially fond of Crunchy, as in crunchy granola, and Skeezy). The last two, Jayzy and Emojy, bring us firmly up to date.

Jayzy is the image of the rapper Jay Z (complete with his NY Yankees cap. From Wikipedia:

Shawn Corey Carter (born December 4, 1969), known professionally as Jay Z, is an American rapper, businessman, and investor. Formerly known as Jay-Z, he is one of the best-selling musicians of all time, having sold more than 100 million records, while receiving 21 Grammy Awards for his music.

And then Emojy, with an emoji-colored face.

This entry was posted on February 9, 2017 at 9:26 am and is filed under Emoji, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Names, Pop culture. 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.