Cartoon

Filed Under April 2007, columns | 4 Comments

It was the best of times, it was … KAPOW!

Dear Word Detective: Our seven year-old daughter asked me this morning “why cartoons are called ‘cartoons.’” I, of course, could not answer this question. We were wondering if you could solve our dilemma and answer that question for us. — John and Abigale Divozzo.

Oh, please. Rome wasn’t built by people who announced “I, of course, could not answer this question.” You’re her parents — make something up, perhaps a story involving automobiles and music. By the time she begins to suspect that you were, shall we say, being creative, she’ll be old enough to write to me herself, and together we’ll make fun of you. But seriously, ninety percent of my business comes from people misled by their parents, and it’s only fair that you hold up your end of the deal.

I’m actually a bit surprised that cartoons are still called “cartoons.” There are people, I have lately discovered, who personally resent, and are not shy about saying so, the venerable term “comic book.” Apparently once a comic book reaches a certain page count, it is now properly known as a “graphic novel.” I know this because our local Barnes & Noble recently ripped out an entire section of old-style novels (the kind with line after line of boring old type) and replaced them with “graphic novels.” Sic transit Madame Bovary. Presuming these things eventually end up on school reading lists (a fair bet), what do you suppose the Cliff’s Notes for them will look like?

Onward. There are two kinds of “cartoons,” of course: the static drawings found on editorial pages and in comic strips, and the moving kind (now often known, apparently inevitably, as “animated features”) shown on TV and in movie theaters. The moving kind of “cartoons” take their name from the static drawings, but the use of “cartoon” to mean a humorous or topical drawing published in a magazine or newspaper dates only to the mid-19th century.

Prior to that time, a “cartoon” was a preliminary sketch made on heavy paper by a serious artist, the word being derived from the Italian “cartone,” based in turn on the Latin “charta,” meaning “writing paper” (which also gave us our English words “chart,” “card” and “charter,” among others). Thus, in this sense, major artists of the stature of Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael (”But the sight best pleased me was the cartoons by Raphael, which are far beyond all the paintings I ever saw,” 1878) produced what are now some very valuable “cartoons.”

 

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Odd/Even

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Level-headed.

Dear Word Detective: The desperate urge to find out the origins of words often creeps up on me, but I can usually work it out myself with the help of dictionaries or your excellent column. However, it recently it suddenly crossed my mind (as it does) that I didn’t know why odd and even numbers were called that. “Even,” OK — smooth, level, equal, etc. — but “being divisible by two” didn’t seem to come up with “even.” And as for “odd,” there’s nothing odd about 3, 5 or 7, any more than 2, 4 or 6, they are just as useful. And, oddly, there is no etymology for “odd” in my dictionaries. Can you help? — David, Ripon, North Yorkshire, England.

So, you’re saying there’s something odd about “even”? “Odd” seems quite a bit odder than “even” to me. Not as odd as otters, of course. Then there are the woodchucks chucking. It’s a wonder I ever get any work done around here. But I dare you to stare at “odd” for a while and not begin to wish you spoke some other language. It’s a seriously weird little word.

Before we get too far into this question, I should explain that I do not understand mathematics. Period. I once had a moment of absolute clarity in ninth grade when I thought I finally understood trigonometry. But the moment lasted all of fifteen minutes, and I’ve been abysmally innumerate ever since. This is relevant because explaining “odd” and “even” necessarily involves a smidgen of math.

Both “odd” and “even” are extremely old words. “Even” harks back to the ancient Germanic root “ebnaz.” It’s not known whether that root meant “equal, the same” or “flat or level,” the two primary meanings of “even” today, but when “even” first appeared in Old English, it carried the primary sense of “level, not sloping.” The application of “even” to numbers as the opposite of “odd,” oddly enough, dates only to the middle of the 16th century. The sense is that an “even” number of things, divided by two, would create two equal amounts with no difference — no slope, so to speak — between them.

“Odd” comes from the old Scandinavian root meaning “triangle,” which led to the Old Norse “oddi” having the sense of “three” (as in sides of a triangle), which evolved into a word applied to an “extra” element added to a pair or the “odd man” who might break a tie vote. The mathematical meaning comes, again, from division by two, which in the case of an “odd” number, results in one being left over and the two parts not being “even.” The use of “odd” to mean “strange” or “unusual” stems from this sense of an “outsider” that doesn’t neatly fit in.

 

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