In the Wayno / Piraro Bizarro for 3/16/26, two characters from Disney animation commiserate in a bar: Dopey (the least of the Seven Dwarfs in Disney’s telling of the Snow White tale from the Brothers Grimm) with a mug of beer, Goofy (the canine companion of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in a long series of short features) doing shots. If you don’t recognize who they are and what their names are, the cartoon is incomprehensible, because the dwarf and the dog are sharing their regret at the names their parents gave them:
What kind of parent would name their son Dopey or Goofy? Those are epithets, not ordinary names, and while the names of all seven dwarfs are actually (evocative) epithets, Goofy hangs with his buddies Mickey and Donald (who have alliterative, but not epithetic, names), so he can feel especially aggrieved (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
The Seven Dwarfs are a band of miners, in both the Grimm and Disney telling of the tale of Snow White, and though they all must have had parents, we know nothing about them; the dwarfs just materialize in their little house, in need of a housekeeper’s touch. The Disney comic animals have vaguely delineated, largely unseen families; about them we know little. Goofy appears to be the screw-up child in his family. And ended up getting called by an epithet.
Well, Goofy began life as Dippy Dawg, again with an unflattering epithet. (My father, with whom I shared a name, sailed through his adult life addressed by an epithet, not his name: the positive-vibe epithet Zip, alluding to his pleasant energy.)
[Note: in order to get Dopey and Goofy sharing their onomastic misgivings, Wayno had to alter the Disney character. In the Disney version of the Seven Dwarfs that appeared in the 1937 animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Dopey never speaks:
Dopey is the youngest dwarf, being the only one who does not have a beard and is bald, with the largest ears of the dwarfs. He is accident-prone and mute, with Happy explaining that he has simply “never tried” to speak. (from the Wikipedia Seven Dwarfs site)
But for Wayno he talks.]
As for Goofy, from Wikipedia:
Goofy is a cartoon character created by the Walt Disney Company. He is a tall, anthropomorphic dog who typically wears a turtle neck and vest, with pants, shoes, white gloves, and a tall hat originally designed as a rumpled fedora. Goofy is a close friend of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, and is Max Goof’s father. He is normally characterized as hopelessly clumsy and dim-witted, yet this interpretation is not always definitive; occasionally, Goofy is shown as intuitive and clever, albeit in his own unique, eccentric way.
So he is apparently named Goofy Goof (father of Max Goof).
March 19, 2026 at 6:18 am |
I smiled at the implied name “Zip Zwicky”.
March 19, 2026 at 7:08 am |
I was so used to my father being Zip to almost everyone in the world (including my mother) — so that I was just Arnold to them — that I forgot the oddness. Then new friends would come to our house and ask me in puzzlement why my parents were called Zip and Marty (my mother’s legal name was Marcella, which she absolutely hated, so early on she took the nickname Marty as her true name).
None of my grandparents (on either side) could bear to call my dad Zip, and insisted that he was Arnold. Which meant that they all called me Arnold Junior, Junior for short. Which I detested, but had to bear with; they were visibly European peasants with heavy accents living in a new land (to which they were fiercely attached) and deserved respect and tolerance.
But yes, Zip Zwicky. Briefly in college I was Zot Zwicky (after the anteater in the comic strip B.C.), because in that male social world *everybody* had to have a nickname, and a ZZ was irresistible. (This was a decade before ZZ Top.) I have never been associated with Zsa Zsa Gabor, though that’s an interestingly kinky thought. Otherwise ZZ is bees buzzing, sawing wood, noisy sleeping, and ZigZag cigarette papers.