Pow! Smash! Truncate!

Mark Liberman has an interesting post over at Language Log about the spelling of interjections and onomatopoetic words in comic strips. It brought back a memory of a Broom Hilda strip I read sometime in the 5th grade. Someone was getting beaten up, and the frame showed the standard cloud of dust with fists and legs sticking out of it. And of course, a few powerful words surrounding it. There was probably a pow!, maybe a smash!, but the one I remember most clearly was truncate! I’d learned that word only recently, when we’d done some geometry in school, so I could see how it made sense: Someone, we were to believe, was getting cut in half inside that dust cloud. But still, the word somehow didn’t belong, and I finally figured out it was because when you truncated something, it didn’t make the sound truncate!–it’d probably sound more like grind, snap, or ssssshhh, depending on what you were truncating. (Yes, yes, I laughed at the joke in addition to analyzing it.)

It’s been years since I’ve seen any Broom Hilda strips, but I do get For Better of For Worse, and I’ve noticed that writer Lynn Johnston often has non-onomatopoetic words floating around in an action scene for humorous effect. For example, the mother in the strip was furiously cleaning the house in one frame, and floating around her were words like swish, swish, swish!, but also clean, clean, clean! and tidy, tidy, tidy! And it seems to me I also saw one where a character was laboriously chewing a bite of food, with the words chew, chew, chew, and masticate appearing overhead.

I wonder how long comic strip artists have been able to exploit this kind of humor. Comic strips have been around only a little more than 100 years, and in that time frame there would need to be three stages:

1. Audience accepts that onomatopoetic words can appear somewhere in the comic frame to signify how something sounds.

2. Audience recognizes that some of the onomatopoetic words appearing in the frame can signify actions that someone is performing–specifically, those that can be used as verbs: crash, smack, crunch, etc.

3. Audience will recognize any verb, not just an onomatopoetic one, as signifying an action performed by a character when it is written in the same frame as the character.

Of course, as long as people are laughing at words like truncate or tidy floating around in comic strip frames, we’re not actually into Stage 3. When the words are no longer funny just by virtue of being used this way, that’s when we’ll be there.