"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 14/08/17 (words from cartoons: shazam, Jeep, goon, zilch)

I'va talked before about the few words that have passed over into English from cartoons, so they were used in very secific senses in cartoons and then crept into mainstream language. So I thought I'd do a few more today. I've mentioned shazam, which was Captain Marvel's famous magic wors in the Whiz Comics. And Jeep as well. Jeep obviously stands for G-P, general purpose for the vehicles, but was definitely influenced by Eugene the Jeep, and then there's malarkey as well. Usually taken to be an alteration, if you like, of an Irish surname, but also goes back probably to an American cartoonist who used that surename as a byword for nonsense. I don't know if he was anti-Irish or not, but certanly, again, that probably how it ctept into the language. But I was going to concentrate on a couple. One is a goon and it's thought from origilally derive from an old English dialect word, gooney, and that was used by sailors to describe really cumbersome-looking, quite weighty sea birds like albatrosses and pelicans, a bit loke boobies actually. Boobies was very heavy sea birds that were very, very easy to catch and so the boobie prize comes from there. It's just something that was very easy to gain and so not particulary valuable. In the same way, goon came to be used for a dull-looking or a slow-witted person, but the Popeye cartoonist, EC Segar, created the character of Alise the Goon in his cartoon strip and portrayed her as somebody, I think she was a gaintess, she was about eight feet and so, again, that kind of crept into the language as the hired heavy or a thug, somebody who was just very big but not particulary sharp. And finally, possibly my favourite, zilch. We use zilch to mean zero or nothing, but when it was first used, it was a nickname for a useless or hopeless character of non-entity, and that was because of a cartoon strip that appeared in the Ballyhoo American humour magazine in the 1930s, and it featured a hapless buisenessman, who you never actually saw, but he was colled President Henry Zilch, so President Zilch I think could come in useful at some point. But again, that goes back to the cartoon.