Comic-Strip Language

Whether U.S. comic strips are a menace to children is an old and vexing question to conscientious parents. This week came a partial answer.

George E. Hill, professor of Education, Morningside College, Sioux City, Iowa, diligently studied the language of 16 different daily newspaper comics (384 strips altogether) for a month. He did not study comic magazines, nor did he concern himself with the activities of comic-strip characters. He was interested solely in finding out how comics might influence a child's vocabulary. He found that:

> 9,302 different words were used in the strips studied. Nearly 80% of them simple primary-school words. Only slightly more than 5% were slang, misspelled or onomatopoeic words (in comic magazines the proportion is some 10% to 12%).

> 130 different slang words were used. Examples: babe, bracelets, chee, crack pot, darn, dawgoned, diggity, flatfoot, framed, gal, gents, gorsh, heck, haywire, holy-mackerel, hyuh, janes, migosh, nope, nuts, O.K., phooie, scram, shux, tipoff.

> Onomatopoeic words (manufactured to imitate sounds) occurred 233 times. The most frequent ones: heh, haw, hey.

> Comic-strip artists use word distortions for definite purposes -- for humor, to indicate common slurrings, to convey the sound of a dialect. Examples (from Smilin' Jack and Popeye): a-gettin' , ah'm, aihport, fergit, yam (for am), ast, certingly, goner (for going to).

> Burlesque-type comics like Mickey Mouse contain more word distortions than other types (adventure, etc.). Of the 16 strips examined, the one with the most word distortions was Joe Palooka.

Conclusions. Wrote Professor Hill: "Much is being written about the 'menace' of the comics. Unfortunately a distinction is not always drawn between comic magazines and the comics of the daily papers. In [my] opinion, most of the latter are quite harmless. ... [I doubt] that the reading of [newspaper] comics would do any serious harm to a child's vocabulary attainments. Most of the words used would, in fact, tend to help him build vocabulary meanings. . . . We need to be much more concerned about the total effect of the comics on the attitudes and ethical concepts of children. . . . Comics are a part of the folk literature of our day. . . . [Their] ethical significance is almost immeasurable."

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