Yesterday’s Zippy strip manages to combine abstract algebra (in the notion of idempotence) with linguistic behavior (in the notion of onomatomania):
Archive for the ‘Mantras’ Category
Ai, dem potent operators
February 16, 2025
The mantra ray
June 21, 2024Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro brings us a gigantic terrifying fish that flies underwater and, in their telling, repeats a meditative formula while doing so:
(#1) With mantra ‘a word or sound [in this case, the classic syllable om] repeated to aid concentration in meditation’ (NOAD) punning on manta (ray), the name of the fish (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
mantra ray is one of those puns that are just lying around waiting, begging, to be exploited for a cartoon, so it’s no surprise that others have taken advantage of this comic resource before Wayno got to it; I’ll look at three of them below (one from a famous print cartoonist, two from webcomics).
Smockery
June 21, 2022Today’s morning name came to me not as I emerged from sleep, but as the first thing I saw on my computer: today’s Calvin and Hobbes blast from the past (from 6/23/92, summer time 30 years ago) with Hobbes in the grip of onomatomanic fascination with the word smock (warning: it’s catching):
(#1) Smick, smock, sweaty old jock … Well how was I to know there was a party going on? (1958 apologies to Bobby Darin, Murray the K, and Murray’s mother Jean Kaufman; their version is much cleaner)
Zippy the Pinhead is celebrated for his onomatomania, but anyone can play, even stuffed tigers.
The modern smock is a plain functional garment, a kind of protective overshirt (functionally akin to aprons, coveralls, and the like), associated with artists, who work with messy substances. But its history is more complex.
Sticky expressions
March 31, 2013Yesterday, a Zippy with the “found mantra” Vampire Manga Dog condo — an expression that lends itself to obsessive repetition. Such sticky expressions are a recurrent theme in Zippy, and they’re related to another sort of sticky expression, the “verbal earworm”, an expression that you can’t get out of your head. In my experience, verbal earworms often originate in found mantras.