Next week, Comic-Con returns to San Diego, where, back in August 1970, it began life in the basement of the U.S. Grant Hotel. That first event drew more than 300 attendees. This summer, at least 130,000 will flock to the fun as our city perks up to the joys and color of comic book characters in our collective consciousness. These comical creations are so woven into the warp and woof of our culture that some of them have transmogrified into words in our everyday speech and writing.
Elbridge Gerry (1744-1814), a vice president to James Madison, is the inspiration for a political term in our English language. In 1812, in an effort to sustain his party’s power, Gerry, who was then governor of Massachusetts, divided that state into electoral districts with more regard to politics than to geographical reality.
To a drawing of one of the governor’s manipulated districts Gilbert Stuart — the same fellow who had painted the famous portrait of George Washington — added a head, eyes, wings and claws. According to one version of the story, Stuart exclaimed about his creation, “That looks like a salamander!”
“No,” countered the editor of the newspaper in which the cartoon was to appear, “Better call it a Gerrymander!”
The verb gerrymander (now lowercased and sounded with a soft g, even though Gerry’s name began with a hard g) is still used today to describe the shaping of electoral entities for political gain.
Historically, gerrymander is the first American word to be born in a cartoon. A special kind of populist literature is the comic strip, and characters and stories we encounter in our newspapers and comic books and on movie screens have exerted an influence on our language.
Thomas Nast, perhaps the most famous political cartoonist in our history, was responsible for the popularity of two party animals. During the election of 1828, opponents of President Andrew Jackson labeled him a “jackass” for his populist beliefs. Jackson was entertained by the notion and ended up using it to his advantage on his campaign posters.
Nast is credited with making Jackson’s donkey the recognized symbol of the Democratic Party through one of his cartoons that appeared in “Harper’s Weekly” in 1870.
Four years later, also in “Harper’s Weekly,” Nast drew a donkey clothed in lion’s skin, scaring away all the animals at the zoo. One of those animals, the elephant, was labeled “The Republican Vote.” That’s all it took for the elephant to become associated with Republicans.
In 1928, Walt Disney gave the world a Mickey — an all-American rodent who performed heroic deeds and squeaked his undying love for Minnie. Soon after World War II, international markets were flooded with wristwatches bearing Mickey’s likeness. Because these watches were generally cheap affairs subject to chronic and chronological mainspring breakdowns, people started calling anything shoddy or trivial mickey mouse.
The name of H.T. Webster’s wimpy comic-strip character, Caspar Milquetoast, has become a synonym for a wimpy, unassertive man. In a similar vein, some scholars assert that the term sad sack to designate a pathetically inept man, especially a soldier, owes its origin to the cartoon character created by George Baker in 1942.
Speaking of wimpy, some linguists trace wimpy and goon to Elzie Segar’s cartoon strip Thimble Theatre, which, when animated became Popeye.
On the fritz, meaning “not operating properly,” may have started with one of the earliest comic strips, The Katzenjammer Kids. Typically, the two hyperactive German boys, Hans and Fritz, caused all sorts of troubles for the Captain and other grown-ups in the story.
For more than eight decades, Blondie’s husband has been creating culinary masterpieces in the kitchen, yet he doesn’t appear to have gained an ounce (for which I hate him). Dagwood carries the cornucopia of ingredients from the refrigerator to the kitchen table on his arms and head, and the massive repasts he concocts are now known as Dagwood sandwiches.
Please send your questions and comments about language to richard.lederer@utsandiego.com