Shakespeare, as most people know, added a great number of words and phrases to English. The same is true of some other esteemed writers, including John Milton and others. By “others”, of course, you’ll probably have guessed that I mean people like Billy De Beck. He was active in the first half of the 20th century, and his body of work is chiefly known for Barney Google. Barney has no known relation to the internet “Google”; Barney Google was a comic strip.
De Beck, through his authorship of Barney Google, added words to English including “heebie-jeebies” (a feeling of apprehension), “hotsy-totsy” (indicating approval), and “horsefeathers” (utter nonsense). Such was the power of De Beck’s authorship and the scope of his readership that he coined “heebie-jeebies” in 1923 and in only three years the term had entered the language to the extent that during the dance craze of that era, a new dance was titled the “heebie-jeebie.”
By the way, Barney Google is not the only cartoon character to add to the language. Not even the first. The phrase “on the fritz,” which means something that’s not working correctly, seems to have come from the Katzenjammer Kids comic strip around 1900 or so. Katzenjammer Kids was created by Rudolph Dirks. The kids in question were famous for fouling everything up in creative (and hopefully amusing) ways — and their names were Hans and Fritz.
But wait, there’s more! Elzie Segar was the creator of the comic strip Popeye, and in 1933 introduced a new character: Alice the Goon. You’ve heard the word “goon,” I suspect — and although the word itself had existed before, it just meant silly. The current meaning, which means a strong thug probably associated with criminality, came straight from Popeye. Another character from Popeye was Eugene the Jeep. Eugene sort of looked like a balloon-animal dog and had super powers like walking through walls and on ceilings — in short, Eugene could go anywhere. In 1941 a small vehicle was developed for the US Army. It was designed to “go anywhere”, and although it had an official designation, everybody immediately called it a “Jeep.” There’s a persistent rumor that the word “Jeep” comes from “G.P” for “general purpose — not true; it’s straight from Popeye.
Sensational, partially fictional reporting for newspapers is nothing new, and perhaps the most enormous, nationwide battle between newspapers started in 1895 in New York. William Randolph Hearst (newspaper baron) bought the New York Journal to compete with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World paper. The newspapers vied to attract bigger audiences by slowly abandoning any notion that just because something is in the newspaper, it ought to have really happened. But they also battled for preeminence in a brand-new section: comics. The World included the world’s first really successful comic strip, The Yellow Kid by R. F. Outcault. The Journal hired Outcault away (by offering him his weight in $100 bills, which in the late 1800s must have added up to quite a fortune). The World responded by simply hiring somebody else to keep turning out Yellow Kid strips — and the result was that BOTH papers included a Yellow Kid comic strip. People were beginning to notice that the competition between the two papers was resulting in journalism that didn’t even come up to the standards of today’s National Enquirer (which doesn’t have any standards at all), and they started to call what was going on “yellow-kid journalism.” That was quickly shortened to the phrase that’s still around today: “yellow journalism.”
Another comic strip titan was Tad Dorgan — he created loads of comics in the first decades of the 20th century, although none were long-running or featured persistent characters. Instead, Dorgan single-handedly created American slang for a few decades. It’s because of Dorgan’s work that people say “for crying out loud,” “you tell ‘em,” “drugstore cowboy,” “malarky,” and “hard-boiled” (in the sense of a “hard-boiled detective”; not the eggs). A 1919 cartoon was the first time “dumbbell” was used as an insult. And if you read about popular culture in the 1920s you’ll see phrases like “cat’s pajama’s,” “23-skidoo,” “cake-eater,” and “yes, we have no bananas” — those, too, are all from Dorgan.
At about this point, you might wonder to yourself “Are We Having Fun Yet”? A good question, but more to the point, that phrase came from the 1970s cartoon Zippy the Pinhead.
