The Writer of Slogans
Clare Briggs
Clare Briggs is a famous cartoonist who lived from 1875 to 1930. Poems by Wilbur Nesbitt.
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on Open Mic for the week of 1/20/2025I suppose the most obvious response is "he did step down! and Harris lost anyway!" Yeah. She did. An…
on Open Mic for the week of 1/20/2025Canada is a “country that should be a (US) state,” reiterates President Trump. “They’ll get much bet…
on Open Mic for the week of 1/20/2025I have no idea how you can think we are misreading JB as being anything but a Trumpist considering e…
on Open Mic for the week of 1/20/2025Heck, he's driving the big boat. But technically, he's supposed to do that (send the fleet, not driv…
Comics
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As Long as the World Goes Round
January 25, 2025
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Skin-nay’s Folks are Moving Away
January 24, 2025
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January 23, 2025
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“There’s a Lot of Sickness in Town”
January 22, 2025
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on Open Mic for the week of 1/20/2025
on POETS Day! Poems Found While Reading an Essay by Anthony Hecht
on Open Mic for the week of 1/20/2025
on Open Mic for the week of 1/20/2025
The prequel to Mad Men.
“Good till the last drop” kicked off in 1908… but not with Maxwell House. With Coca-Cola.Report
As usual the husband/wife scenes are always so sweet. I have this nagging feeling that were I reading this comic when it had been published I would be bemused and would recognize common slogans from the time in every single panel. As it is it just reads as oddly worded. I suspect it’s a prisoner of its era.Report
I’m joking with this because you are not into twitter at all, but this is just like twitter. You’ve nailed part of the experience of having a language and set of common references that are incoherent nonsense out of it’s context. But in context it’s often hilarious.Report
Heh, well done. As if I needed another reason to dislike twitter. So the limited space requires adopting a constantly shifting set of short hand that may not survive the passage of time? That means that twitter discourse will basically be in a difficult to decipher code once enough time passes. Though I am being overly generous to twitter, perhaps, in assuming future generations will even want to review twitter discourse.Report
I don’t think it’s the space: I think it’s the fact that it’s a somewhat self-contained “community,” comprised of a bunch of fairly self-contained communities. In addition to things only people on Twitter know about, because they were only (or primarily) talked about there (escaped llamas, the dress, or more recently, stolen monkeys), jokes widely shared there and not elsehwere (“x AND y, in THIS economy?!”), etc., creating all sorts references common on Twitter and nowhere else, as we know from countless studies, people who interact with each other a lot begin to develop common speech patters, slangs, even something like dialects.
Twitter has always had a really high learning curve, compared to other social media sites (which tend to bleed into each other, either by accident or by design), or are just not that difficult to figure out, at least once you figure out how to use the app itself (thinking of you, Tik Tok!), for this reason. It’s insular, and like the comment section here, it takes a while to learn how to read and speak its language.Report
Surely the space is an element though? Didn’t hashtags and visual memes develop partially to try and convey more info with smaller numbers of characters/pictures? Eh, I’m probably just being a grumpy old man about twitter but the character limit really irritates me- especially when you inevitably see the streams of tweets necessary to convey even a moderate sized idea on an interesting subject. And it’s not like the successor platforms are going in the other direction- if anything the newer platforms use even fewer text characters.Report
That’s true, space is definitely an influence on the dialect, though I think it’s become less important over the years, as people have figured out ways to work around it (screen shots, long threads, etc.).
Hashtags are almost obsolete, at this point, though memes will never die.Report
Yo.Report
I will guarantee future generations will study twitter. They may be horrified or amused or puzzled but it will be studied. There will be dissertations done on memes and slang and gifs.Report
I wouldn’t take the flip side on that bet.Report
Given what we know of social relationships and interactions throughout human history I think past and future societies would understand Twitter better than we think.
Consider Dangerous Liasons in modern form using only tweets.Report
I’d prefer Wuthering Heights done with semaphore flags but that is me and my old person references.
Yup they will get twitter in the future.Report
Captain America meme: I understood that reference.Report
That got me curious.
First panel: “I’d walk a mile for a Camel”. Don’t even need to look this up except to confirm that, yep, it’s contemporary.
Second panel: One, maybe two, maybe three. “How about X? No imitations! Food what am.” So let’s google “1910s advertising” and “what am” and… Hoo boy. Armour’s Star is “the Ham what Am”. Content warning on that link, mind. “Accept no imitations” was another Coke motto. “How about food?” No idea. I can’t find any ads that asked “how about”.
Panel 3… Nonpareil is one of those words that got used a *LOT*. Valves, apricots, mince meat. I didn’t see it prominently in ads. Eureka vacuums? Not until the late 20’s. There was a Eureka light/ignition (for your Ford automobile or Tractor). Maybe it refers to the car?
Say it with Flowers, though, goes back to 1917.
“If better X could be made, I would make it!” sounds like an ad campaign that was still going in the 70’s. I can’t find anything though.
Panel six: “The bed that mother made” had me searching for “the ones that mother made” and I found some references to a poem about pumpkin pies from the era but not any ads for them. Just, you know, a poem about a guy’s mom’s pumpkin pies.
“No metal can touch you” seems to have been ad copy for Paris Garters.
It’s Toasted is another one I don’t even have to look up. Lucky Strikes. Mmmm. They’re toasted.
And “Eventually Why Not Now?” was ad copy for Gold Medal Flour.
Hey, some of those might be usable again. We could bring back Nonpareil! Nonpareil phone chargers! Nonpareil wireless headphones! Nonpareil marijuana paraphernalia!Report
Bless you Jay, this was a real treat for me! I have no doubt at all that every since frame was a slogan that was, at the minimum, very familiar to the cartoonist. That you got so many hits in your search cements my previous impression. Blame the singularity of the cartoonists own experience and the yawning gap of time for anything you didn’t find. This was really fun!Report
If we could find a copy of the newspaper that this cartoon appeared in, I’m sure we’d find half of the less googleable mottos on the surrounding pages.Report
You’re probably right about that!Report
The Jack Dempsey that’s (somewhat) familiar to us as heavyweight champ was born William Harrison Dempsey. His nickname came from a 19th century middleweight who fought as Jack Dempsey (though his real name was John Edward Kelly). The earlier Dempsey’s nickname? Nonpareil.Report
Now that’s awesome.Report