Arnold Zwicky's Blog

The latest issue of the magazine has two cartoons I want to pick out for comment, one (by Mick Stevens) because it’s an addition to Arnoldia, the domain of things with the name Arnold; the other (by David Sipress) because it’s a pointed comment on this alarming and dangerous time in my country.

Stevens: Arnold the klutzy magic bunny. Two magic bunnies in the cartoon:

(#1) Arnold the klutz can’t even manage a simply hat trick

(Page on this blog on my postings about Stevens cartoons: here)

First, the noun klutz: informal, mainly North American a clumsy, awkward, or foolish person (NOAD)

And then Stevens chose the name Arnold for the klutzy figure of fun. From a posting on 8/1/10, “Zippylicious names”:

I am the bearer of a name that strikes many people as intrinsically funny, or stupid, or unpleasant, or just weird, with its stereotypically Jewish or German first name (and the association with the nebbishy Arnold Stang) and its hard-to-pronounce Eastern-European-sounding last name.

(with the noun nebbish: informal, mainly North American a person, especially a man, who is regarded as pitifully ineffectual, timid, or submissive (NOAD))

Oi, I’m a klutz and now a nebbish too. And Yinglish-inflected.

Welcome to Arnoldia, the domain of things with the name Arnold: the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University [digression irrelevant to this cartoon, but relevant to the next one: let us all praise Harvard], the comic strip character Arnold Peck the Human Wreck, the poet Matthew Arnold [from “Dover Beach”: we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight], Arnold Island in Québec, and much more.

From my 10/7/15 posting “Adventures in Arnoldia”, on Arnold as a name (tilted towards nebbishes and dubious or unsavory characters):

Wikipedia also has a list about Arnold as a given name. Real people [a list that, of course, doesn’t include me]: Arnold Stang [the actor], Arnold Palmer [the golfer], Arnold Scharzenegger [the bodybuilder and politician]. [add: Arnold Bennett the novelist, Arnold Schoenberg the composer, and Arnold Toynbee the historian] And fictional Arnolds: Arnold Rimmer (a hologram character in Red Dwarf), Arnold Ziffel (Fred Ziffel’s pig on Green Acres), Arnold Zeck (the villainous character in the Nero Wolfe books). Imagine them together as the Three Arnolds — a singing group, or a comedy team, or a gang, or whatever. Arnold Stang, Palmer, and Schwarzenegger, together for your listening enjoyment. Arnold Rimmer, Ziffel, and Zeck, the dreaded Enforcers for the Mob.

Sipress: apocalypse now, but first a word from our sponsor. The evening newscast skates over the approaching disaster:

(#2) William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” (1919): the world incomprehensibly torn apart at the time, with (as we now know) Franco, Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin all not far away on the horizon; meanwhile, the newscaster delivers Yeats’s alarm as just another news item, details to follow

(Page on this blog on my postings about Sipress cartoons: here)

Some discussion of the Yeats poem in my 3/11/25 posting “Falling apart: the meta-posting”. The beginning of the poem, putting the newscaster’s quote (in boldface) in its poetic context:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand. …

Note the gyre, referring to a spiral pattern.  Yeats held to a cyclical theory of history (and many other things in life); the current anarchy would swing to better times. (And then Yeats died in January 1939.)

But now, how to live, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity?

This entry was posted on May 24, 2025 at 2:21 pm and is filed under History, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Names, Poetry, Slurs. 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.