Goink!

One of the awesome secret powers that cartoonists have is the ability to invent new words for describing sounds. This morning Scott Adams did it with the Dilbert cartoon shown above.

The third frame in which Dogbert says, “I love having a favorite new word” got cut off. My only question is how to pronounce this latest two-syllable word. Should it be go-ink, or perhaps goy-nk?

Either way, trapdoors have a long history as punch lines for comedy, as shown in this Monty Python sketch about a merchant bank which also included laying off one of their two pantomime horses.

In one of his BC cartoons Johnny Hart revealed that kazango is the sound made when a dinosaur sneezes a flower out so rapidly that it punches a hole right through a tree.

Have you ever been tempted to create a new word to describe something? I sure have. Some of the discussions of the paranormal on the Coast to Coast AM radio show hosted by George Noory are so outrageous that describing them calls for a new term – parastupid. Someone else already has used it to name a web site.

Back in college I actually met a person who invented a prize winning word, but that’s another story.