Yesterday’s (4/24) Zippy strip has our Pinhead singing the praises of everyday stationery supplies, in particular the cylinders (now usually made of plastic) used to convey rolled-up sheets of material with printing or designs on them: the telescoping plastic mailing tube:
Zippy chants for the TPMT
Four words of decreasing length (in number of syllables), in two phrases:
— the adjectival modifiers telescoping ‘which telescopes’ and plastic ‘which is made of plastic’ (4 + 2 syllables)
— and the head compound noun mailing tube ‘tube for mailing things’ (2 + 1 syllable)
Thereby achieving the effect of building to a final one-syllable bang.
Meanwhile, the strip is about Zippy’s onomatomania, defined by Merriam-Webster online as:
an abnormal obsession with words or names; especially: a mania for repeating certain words or sounds
From my 2/3/24 posting “Palilogia, we adore ya”:
[The 2/2/24] Zippy strip shows our Pinhead submitting to (in his words) ‘the desire to repeat a word or phrase’, a condition that (borrowing from literature on rhetoric) he calls palilogia [what he’s repeating is the word palilogia!]
… Earlier Zippy strips referred to the clinical affliction phrase repetition disorder and the mantric or chanting practice onomatomania (there’s a Page on this blog about my postings on “Chants, cheers, mantras, onomatomania”). The rhetorical term — with Greek initial element pali(n) ‘again’ plus the ‘word’ stem log — merely refers to repetition; what Zippy’s usage adds is a note of impulse or compulsion that ties the term to phrase repetition disorder and onomatomania.
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