The oxymoron-flavored punchline of today’s Zippy strip:
(#1) “Frivolity is a stern taskmaster”: it had the feel of a play on some existing quotation, so I searched on “stern taskmaster” — only to discover that frivolity is a stern taskmaster is indeed a famous quotation, widely attributed (without specific source) to … Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead!
At first, I hoped that one of the trackers of quotation sources — especially the Quote Investigator – would have taken this one on, but no luck there, so it was on to a long and tedious search through the Zippy archives. From which I emerged with an apparent winner, in a 2008 strip (though there was a 2003 strip with Jack Kerouac is a stern taskmaster in it; and a 2023 strip entitled “Stern Taskmaster” — both of which I’ll show you).
Then some investigation of stern taskmaster, which turns out to be a common collocation, one of the big three Adj collocations with the N taskmaster: hard, tough, and stern. Not (yet) fixed expressions — catchphrases, slogans, or even idioms — but something more than the fresh combinations of Adj and N into nominal phrases, approaching stock expressions.
