Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s Zippy, “Merry Whatever”, set in the Beatnik District of Dingburg, supplies (in the second panel) a burlesque of a beloved Christmas carol:

(#1)

So you can line up the burlesque with the model:

Silent night, holy night
All is calm, all is bright

If you had just the first line of the burlesque, you might not recognize that it’s a take-off (because the burlesque is so far from the model phonologically), but then

All is Guam, all is Sprite

brings you to the carol.

Otherwise, the strip is loaded with references, to beatnik-talk, Allen Ginsberg, e.e. cummings, existentialism, and current consumer technology, as well as Christmas.

I’m not sure how to interpret that final no-el (beyond Noel / Noël ‘Christmas’), though I’m tempted to see the no as a negative, as in this prohibitive sign:

(#2)

(I haven’t seen the “No L” symbol attributed to any specific source, and it seems likely that many people hit on the idea independently, once the convention of a slash for prohibitions became widespread.)

This entry was posted on December 25, 2018 at 10:45 pm and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Music, Parody, Signs and symbols. 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.