Facebook’s like Loweezy. That’s what started it — a silly thought at the end of some long, winding brain ramble. But, I forgot the name of the comic strip which featured Loweezy. Not being able to think of something simple, something I know I know is like an itch I can’t scratch. It took me quite a while to find it. Googling “comic strip old man gossiping wife” doesn’t help. I had to look through a long list of comic strips on Wikipedia. Of course, it was very near the end — Snuffy Smith. You know, the one with the old hillbilly and his wife, Loweezy, who’s always gossiping with the neighbor at the fence row? Yeah. Facebook.
You should not be trusting this guy
While I was poking around, I found this on the Barney Google and Snuffy Smith Wikipedia page.
Following “The Goo-Goo Song” (1900), the word “Google” was introduced in 1913 in The Google Book, a children’s book about the Google and other fanciful creatures who live in Googleland: “The Google has a beautiful garden which is guarded night and day. All through the day he sleeps in a pool of water in the center of the garden; but when the night comes, he slowly crawls out of the pool and silently prowls around for food.” Aware of the word’s appeal, (Billy) DeBeck launched his comic strip (Barney Google, known today as Snuffy Smith) six years later, and the “goo-goo-googly” lyrics in the 1923 song “Barney Google” (a song inspired by the comic) focused attention on the novelty of the word. When the mathematician and Columbia University professor Edward Kasner was challenged in the late 1930s to devise a name for a very large number, he asked his nine-year-old nephew, Milton Sirotta, to suggest a word. The youthful comic strip reader told Kasner to use “Google”. Kasner agreed and in 1940 he introduced the words “googol” and “googolplex” in his book, Mathematics and the Imagination. Milton Sirotta died in 1980. This is the term that Larry Page and Sergey Brin had in mind when they named their company in 1998, but they misspelled “googol” as “google,” bringing it full circle right back to Billy DeBeck.
Nevermind that it clearly states in its first sentence that the word Google was invented by the author of “The Google Book,” Vincent Cartwright Vickers. Nevermind that Billy DeBeck is already credited with inventing the phrases “horsefeathers,” “hotsy-totsy,” “sweet mama,” the ever popular “times a-wastin’,” my personal favorite “heebie-jeebies,” and the inexplicable “Who has seen the doodle bug?” Let’s give him “Google,” too. Screw that Vickers dude.
By the way, this is a Google.
Barney Google and Snuffy Smith
[Via Wikipedia]
