🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit, the sultry bunnies of July! But they are no match for Mononga Hela, the monstrous snake that swallows fat Carnegie melons, prodigious feral boars, and of course entire railway trains whole — the fearsome creature that in popular lore is said to have consumed all of western Pennsylvania in a fit of pique. Mononga Monga Ooga Gila Hellmouth!
But first, the Zippy strip from 6/27:
Beyond spelling: Zippy appreciates the power of the name Monongahela; and of course potrzebie, but the word for the day is Monongahela
I am Monongahela, hear me roar. First, the fact from my middle-school class in Pennsylvania history:
the joining of rivers: the Allegheny [4 syllables] meets the Monongahela [5 syllables] to form the Ohio [3 syllables]
Even as a young teen, I saw that this was poetically, prosodically, all futzed up: the result should be bigger than the contributors; the joining of rivers should be called, oh, say, the Monongallegheny [6 syllables].
Meanwhile, any fool — especially one familiar with Zippy’s onomatomaniac inclinations — should be able to see that Monongahela was made to be chanted:
Monongahela Monongahela, WSWSW WSWSW, with the dark nasal progression / m … n … ŋ / and then the bright flourish /hilǝ/
And then the bonus…
The train to Potrzebie. The end of the line. See my 5/4/10 posting “What, me worry?”, with a section on potrzebie in Mad Magazine.
And then, attracted by the railway cars, the monster Mononga Hela rose from the river’s depths and devastated Steel City and everything around it. Such a tsuris!
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