Arnold Zwicky's Blog

In today’s Zippy strip, Zerbina and Zippy indulge their onomatomania — a love of certain expressions that leads the affected person to chant them over and over for pleasure — by slinging competing (trochaic tetrameter) product names at one another competitively, before falling passionately into one another’s arms:

The chants:

Zerbina: touchless airtight bag sealers SW SW S SW

Zippy: shake ‘n squeeze correction pen SW SW SW S

The product names. This being a Bill Griffith strip, you can bet that the product names are real ones, not just ingenious inventions. And so it is.

Google has touchless airtight bag sealers as a product category; and if you want perfect trochaic tetrameter, with no short (one-beat) feet, you can’t beat the Touchless Handheld Heat Bag Sealer (from the iTouchless company, sold on Amazon).

And then Amazon offers the BIC Wite-Out Brand Shake ‘n Squeeze Correction Pen.

This entry was posted on July 26, 2023 at 6:47 am and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Poetic form, Word attraction. 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.