Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Charles Schulz’s Peanuts strip from 12/31/57, in which Snoopy takes on a penguin persona:

(#1)

(Hat tip to Jeff Bowles.)

Just the Snoopy-as-penguin part, sold as a postcard (or playing card) in a set of Snoopy’s guises:

(#2)

The allusion in my title is to the Rudyard Kipling story “The Man Who Would Be King”. From Wikipedia:

(#3) Poster for the 1975 John Huston movie

“The Man Who Would Be King” (1888) is a story by Rudyard Kipling about two British adventurers in British India who become kings of Kafiristan, a remote part of Afghanistan. The story was first published in The Phantom Rickshaw and other Eerie Tales (1888) It also appeared in Wee Willie Winkie and Other Child Stories (1895), and numerous later editions of that collection. It has been adapted for other media a number of times.

Note: in the Kipling title, anarthrous predicative king denotes a role or position, not a type or an individual. I’ve carried that syntax and semantics over into my title, as if being the penguin was a recognized role or position in some domain. Percy is penguin now. All hail Penguin Percy!

This entry was posted on January 23, 2019 at 10:07 am and is filed under Books, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Penguins. 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.