The urge to be on the inside turns into acknowledging the inside is another’s outside. A phrase or title from a more respected, usually literary work, with a minor tweak, and bang! boom! new title for you comic, which has instant recognizability and just enough of a wink of knowingness to it that it appeals to the geek drive to be on the inside track.Īs mainstream anglophone culture becomes close to synonymous with geek culture, we may even take pride in slang terms achieving a fnord level, both inside joke and near-meaningless semblance, as right wing or terroristic terms like chad and simp and based are recouped by leftists and leftist terms like woke and problematic are coopted into attacks that produce cognitive dissonance. In the 1960s, Roy Thomas introduces the parody title as a mainstream technique in comics. Geek culture and all other cultures have been growing more linguistically blurred and more semantically complex and we can only blame the new and many ways we have to record the word so far. It is a social measure.įinnegans Wake and Star Trek, The Principia Discordia, Robert Heinlein’s Future History, the extreme linguistics and lingual histories that shape JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth stories, from The Lord of the Rings to one of those fuzzy, barely titled fragments he probably wrote as a layer of jokes on the back of someone’s assignment during a faculty meeting. This fills comics people with pride even when they, as individuals, do not care one way or the other about an expansive vocabulary. Finnegans Wake is Lemarckism applied to language, trying to force lingual evolution through the inheritance of acquired characteristics.Įnglish-language comics have had a higher ratio of rare words and technical terms than comparable prose or television since the invention of commercial television. They make sure to yell that last part.īut, a battery of missiles carrying VX gas also simply sounds like a danger.ġ939’s Finnegans Wake, a novel by James Joyce, is so self-pleasingly a work of sheer geek that it breaks the backs of words to fit more puns in. The 1995 action movie, The Rock, knows we might not be able to look up, “VX” to see that it is a deadly nerve agent, or that VX actually stands for, “venomous agent X,” so they make sure to say, aloud, every time VX is mentioned, that it is deadly, “poison gas,” “a serious problem,” and that it could kill sixty or seventy thousand people. The weapons in the Star Wars franchise are all incredibly descriptive, like their narcotics, except for “midichlorians,” which simply sound like a science thing. The Thundercats are named Lion-O and Panthro because kids can sort out who is like a lion, who like a panther. If the Comics Code Authority asks, “freaking” is not a euphemism for, “fucking,” and, “leman,” just means, “really good roommate.” Nerd culture is antiauthoritarian any time except when they want to be the authorities. Screenwriters learned they could slip slang or unusual words into a script and have them float by unnoticed or misinterpreted by many, delighting linguists, people savvy to the slang, and nerds who just like word gaming however you do it. The advent of movie with sound saw an advance in how pop entertainment handled terminology, because very rarely did someone bring with them to the theatre a dictionary and a flashlight to use to peruse it. If we did not love and benefit directly from puns, pornography would not be using them as often as sex and nudity since before there were motion pictures. By Travis Hedge Coke on FebruPatricia Highsmash
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