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Post by Slam_Bradley on Dec 31, 2018 20:23:11 GMT -5
“Bought the farm” (died) is one I saw only in comics. Heard that all the time as a kid in Idaho.
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Post by chadwilliam on Jan 1, 2019 0:44:05 GMT -5
From Action Comics 1.
"But this is not a robber's dance."
"Fight... you weak-livered pole cat!"
"Are you sure it wasn't pink elephants you saw?" More an old timey expression than slang.
"Say doll, you're a real living sweet patootie! What say you and me twenty-three skidoo out of this gin mill and go cut a rug to a Chattanooga-Two-Step at my jumping joint?" (alright, I made this one up).
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Post by beccabear67 on Jan 1, 2019 14:55:24 GMT -5
I liked all the New York and Yiddish expressions in the Marvel comics, plus just NYC place references. It made them kind of educational. Fershlugginer and Yancy Street stuff, and like that. The Thing and Nick Fury seemed to have the most, plus Stan's Soapbox. DC tended to have Great Ceasar's Ghost and Holy feline felonies, Batman!
I think the dialogue in the old Fiction House jungle characters was pretty amusing too, Sheena exclaiming things like "Aiee, scaled one! So you would think to attack Bob, my mate? Now will you taste Sheena's steel!" Fox was pretty much the same I think. I used to have a bunch of '50s Lorna, Jungle Queen/Girl from Atlas and I don't remember them having the corny dialogue so much (also Lo-Zar, Jann, Tharn, and Leopard Girl).
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Post by pansies on Dec 13, 2020 13:33:24 GMT -5
One that always baffled me was "Goombye please!" from some old Archie comics, usually said when a character was leaving (or trying to leave). I just did a web search on it, and turned up this on The Phrase Finder:
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Post by pansies on Dec 13, 2020 13:46:10 GMT -5
One that always baffled me was "Goombye please!" from some old Archie comics, usually said when a character was leaving (or trying to leave). I just did a web search on it, and turned up this on The Phrase Finder:
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Post by chadwilliam on Dec 13, 2020 14:31:55 GMT -5
Never understood what Etta Candy meant by 'Woo! Woo!" in all those old Wonder Woman comics. Was it a cheer? Was she out of breath? I eventually heard that it was something Hugh Herbert came up with but while assured that it made sense, still couldn't see how. Finally, I saw him in Sh! The Octopus and the Basil Rathbone/Bela Lugosi feature The Black Cat and turns out it's sort of like "Hoo boy!" I suppose. Had I been a Three Stooges fan as a kid I probably would have gotten it immediately since Curly lifted his 'Woo, woo, woo!' from Herbert as well.
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Post by MDG on Dec 13, 2020 15:36:22 GMT -5
Not slang, but in the stories in Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes, as a kid I was thrown by the frequent use of "Hello!" as an expression of surprise.
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Post by foxley on Dec 13, 2020 15:44:57 GMT -5
Not slang, but in the stories in Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes, as a kid I was thrown by the frequent use of "Hello!" as an expression of surprise. It was fairly common in Britain, and you will hear it in a lot of British films of the period. In print, it is usually rendered as "Hullo" to distinguish from the greeting, and to indicate the slight difference of pronunciation (at least in British English). This came up on an episode of
QI.
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Post by codystarbuck on Dec 13, 2020 15:55:30 GMT -5
EC introduced a lot of then-contemporary Yiddish slang-words to comics in the 1950s, like "furslugginer." Stan kept some of these in play during the 1960s, but hardly anyone kept the Yiddishisms going in the 1970s. Too many goyim!
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Post by codystarbuck on Dec 13, 2020 16:01:57 GMT -5
I use yiddish all the time, at work; combination of comics, Mel Brooks films and similar stuff. Yosemite Sam gets trotted out often, especially when my cat is being a pill (the ornery fur-bearin' critter!)
What a lot of my generation and after missed with Looney Tunes was how many of the catch phrases you hear came from radio. They were very big on using contemporary radio catch phrases and caricatures.
My favorite, especially in a work environment, where I can't cuss (though make me work 9 days straight and deal with idiots who can't be bothered to read simple directions or actually got to our web-site to answer 99%of their questions, rather than call every 2 minutes, when I am busy, and you can see professionalism start to crack), is to break out Sam's "razzafrazzin...etc,etc.."
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Post by foxley on Dec 13, 2020 16:14:32 GMT -5
“Bought the farm” (died) is one I saw only in comics. I'm given to understand that if was common slang in the RAF during WWII: specifically referring to someone who died in a plane crash (possibly due to them 'ploughing into the ground').
No idea if that's where it originated, or if they just adopted it from elsewhere.
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Post by MDG on Dec 13, 2020 18:54:34 GMT -5
I use yiddish all the time, at work; combination of comics, Mel Brooks films and similar stuff. Yosemite Sam gets trotted out often, especially when my cat is being a pill (the ornery fur-bearin' critter!) I use Yiddish a lot as well--12 years of catholic school will do that to you.
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Post by tolworthy on Dec 14, 2020 5:48:36 GMT -5
"blue beetle" was a 1930s-era slang term for a police squad car. Thus there was more to that hero's name than a simple echo of the Green Hornet. Another example is "Mr Zimmer" from Kirby's short lived series "Read To Us, Mr Zimmer". Turns out that Kirby was a fan of Heinrich Zimmer, the legendary story collector who in inspired Joseph Campbell. Once you know that, weak parts of the story suddenly become the strongest parts. I recently explored some of Kirby's character names from the 1940s and 1950s. Turns out they are not as random as the appear. Usually you can see where the name came from, even though Kirby probably chose them unconsciously. Some examples: - June Robbins (the computer programmer who joined the Challengers) looks a bit like Julia Robinson, the then-famous mathematician.
- Cherry Romaine ("Gun Moll") is about an innocent girl who lost her innocence and had a bitter life. Cherry romaine was a salad, and she lost her salad days. Cherry also means innocence or virginity. And romaine lettuce was routinely used at Passover as the "bitter herb". (Kirby, a practising Jew, would be well aware.)
- Bucky Williams, the reporter in Blue Bolt who refused to give up. "Buck" means goat, an animal famed for being stubborn, and "William" literally means strong willed: I bet that Kirby, as a history buff who collected odd facts, would at least be vaguely aware of that.
- Phillip Hannah, the newly drafted soldier in "A Dream Saved His Life". Kirby knew his classical history, and also went to Hebrew school. So he would probably know that Phillip was a popular warrior king name (e.g. at least five kings of Macedonia, including Philip the Great, father of Alexander the Great). And he would definitely know that Hannah in the Bible is a story of God's grace, and the name means "grace". Those names pretty much describe the story.
- "Richard Temple" is the man who explains dreams in "Strange World of Your Dreams": "Richard" means "strong and noble" - even if he didn't know that, it was a really solid boy's name at the time. And the temple is the usual name for the synagogue, where the rabbis explain ambiguous things.
- "Madelon Roberts" from "The Girl in The Grave". The story is about a girl who gets her first job after a lot of trying, but is still extremely worried. Her worry seems overblown until you think about the name. "Madelon" is not a common name. It's a variant of Magdalene, from Mary Magadeline in the Bible. Mary Magdalene was a reformed prostitute. "La Madelon" was a famous wartime song about a girl called Madelon who was a friend to all the soldiers. The lyrics are clean, but it does not take a genius to read between the lines. The most famous Madelon in Kirby's youth would be the eponymous character from the Oscar winning 1931 movie "The Sin of Madelon Claudet", a piece of misery porn about the poor woman's suffering. (There was also the model Madelon Mason, "America's Cover Girl": while that was just her name, it no doubt helped to have a hint of bad girl sexiness.) Once you see the name "Madelon" in that way, the sexy things the girl does (endlessly putting on more lipstick, passionately kissing a stranger) and her fear of rejection make more sense.
- And so on and so on
Sometimes I see a name that's so oddly random that Kirby MUST surely have some reason for choosing it. Even if the reason is unconscious. But Googling reveals nothing. Probably it was some childhood friend of Kirby's, or a pun on something else that only a 1930s New Yorker would know. But now it's just a random name in a comic. We have lost a lot of the richness of the stories because all those details don't mean anything any more.
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Post by MDG on Dec 14, 2020 9:32:53 GMT -5
"blue beetle" was a 1930s-era slang term for a police squad car. Thus there was more to that hero's name than a simple echo of the Green Hornet. ... Sometimes I see a name that's so oddly random that Kirby MUST surely have some reason for choosing it. Even if the reason is unconscious. But Googling reveals nothing. Probably it was some childhood friend of Kirby's, or a pun on something else that only a 1930s New Yorker would know. But now it's just a random name in a comic. We have lost a lot of the richness of the stories because all those details don't mean anything any more. These are great examples. I often wonder if I'm doing Kirby a dis-service by thinking of him as an "instinctual" story-teller who was able to let a story just flow out of him: plot, character, design, layout. Maybe it's because, unlike people like Kurtzman and Eisner, I haven't seen many example of rough sketches and notes by Kirby, and he didn't seem to talk a lot about process.
A shame he never really got a chance to work with a supportive editor and publisher to be able to create something the way he fully envisioned it.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 14, 2020 20:56:33 GMT -5
EC introduced a lot of then-contemporary Yiddish slang-words to comics in the 1950s, like "furslugginer." Stan kept some of these in play during the 1960s, but hardly anyone kept the Yiddishisms going in the 1970s. Too many goyim! Shut up and eat your shiksa.
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