Arnold Zwicky's Blog

In today’s Zippy,  a recurrent theme in the strip: the game of Telephone, or Chinese Whispers:

(#1)

Discussion of the game on this blog, in connection with earlier Zippy strips:

on 7/9/09 in “The telephone game”:

(#2)

on 3/5/13 in “The Telephone game”:

(#3)

The Wikipedia entry (at least as it is today) is thorough, worth reading carefully. One nice bit,  about the name Chinese Whispers:

Historians trace Westerners’ use of the word “Chinese” to denote “confusion” and “incomprehensibility” to the earliest contacts between Europeans and Chinese people in the 17th century, and attribute it to Europeans’ inability to understand China’s culture and worldview. Using the phrase “Chinese whispers” suggested a belief that the Chinese language itself is not understandable. Additionally Chinese people have historically been stereotyped by Westerners as secretive or inscrutable. The more fundamental metonymic use of the name of a foreign language to represent a broader class of situations involving foreign languages or difficulty of understanding a language is also captured in older idioms, such as “It’s all Greek to me”.

And then the Normal Rockwell version, The Gossips (1948):

(#4)

This entry was posted on May 28, 2018 at 9:39 pm and is filed under Art, Linguistics in the comics. 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.