“Anger can make you old, yes it can. I said anger can make you sick, children… oh Jesus, anger destroys your soul” From Anger, written by Marvin Gaye.
I love our language. Honestly, I have gotten into many long discussions with several different professors about the use of one word over the other. I strongly believe our language is a living, ever-evolving function of our lives.
For example, the phrase “Hulking out” is known to and used by people who have never experienced the literary character upon which that phrase was based. These days “Hulking out” is used to refer to a person losing control or unnecessarily going over the top. Why, it’s even been used as a reference to our president du jour.
Making contributions to our language is nothing new to the comics art field. Certainly, those phrases made popular in media adaptations of comics still rattle though our conversations, such as “look up in the sky” and “holy ANYTHING.” Come to think of it, the phrase that predicates “Hulking out” is “You’re not going to like me when I’m angry.”
Of course, there’s that other Marvel phrase that started its invasion of our consciousness about, oh, 63 years ago that, after about a half-dozen Spider-Man movies, became a genuinely standard cliché: with great power, obviously, comes great opportunity.
One of the best — and oldest — of such references may be apocryphal. I sure hope not, but, then again, I long have been in the business of printing the legend. So go know. I’m here to rat out the hot dog.
Many of the greatest cartoonists of the 20th century had long and famed careers doing sports panels: Jack Davis, Rube Goldberg, Jack Burnley (Superman, Batman, Starman), Leo O’Mealia (Superman, Superboy) and even Robert Ripley (yeah, believe it!) — to name but a very few. With respect to our hallowed lexicon, I am singling out Tad Dorgan.
These days the phrase “hot dog” almost always refers to that ambrosia of sausage also known as frankfurters, wienerwurst and coney island red hots. As a native Chicagoan they are a fabric of my very existence.
Tad Dorgan was a sports cartoonist. One of the best. He is the person widely credited with inventing the term “hot dog.” Keep in mind he made no such claim, and researchers have found a few references to the term that seem to precede Dorgan’s use. But it’s often stated that he did, or probably did, invent that term. Much of this claim can be traced to columnist Westbrook Pegler in his Pulitzer prize winning days as a sports writer, before becoming the darling of the original America and spoakstoad for the John Birch Society. The New Deal, labor unions, and anti-lynching legislation were among his foremost bugaboos, but before all this, in 1923, Pegler credited Tad with creating the phrase “hot dog” in 1906, during the Thaw trial featured in the book, play, and movie Ragtime.
Tad was exceptionally popular; his work already appeared in Hearst papers published in nearly every major American city. He already had created the phrase “Yes, we have no bananas” and, according to Pegler, on the very day Tad died — May 2, 1929 — his wife presented ballpark and race track caterer Harry Stevens with the original art to his cartoon designating the fair fad fare sandwich.
To date this original art has not been found — not even in published form. That is not definitive, but it does justify the use of a noticeable asterisk in the story’s retelling.
Today we take bullshit for granted, and we are much poorer off for it. Already we wonder if a photo or a sound or video recording is a Deep Fake; today’s politically correct term is “A.I.”
I think there may be a point here that many of us can agree with no matter where we lurk in the 3D political spectrum. If anybody is going to “Hulk Out” in Washington DC, it should only be the Incredible Hulk.
(Thanks and a tip of the beanie to Professor Valerie Macys for inadvertently triggering this week’s sardonic whimsy)
