Potrzebie
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Potrzebie is a Polish word popularized by its non sequitur use as a running gag in the early issues of Mad not long after the comic book began in 1952. The word is pronounced [ˈpɔtˈʃɛbʲe] in Polish and is a declined form of the noun "potrzeba" (which means "need"), but in English it was purportedly pronounced /ˈpɒtɚzɛbi/ or /ˈpɒtrəziːbi/. Its Eastern European feel was a perfect fit for the New York Jewish style of the magazine.
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[edit] Origin
Mad editor Harvey Kurtzman spotted the word printed in the Polish language section of a multi-languaged "Instructions for Use" sheet accompanying a bottle of aspirin, and Kurtzman, who was fascinated with unusual words and Yiddishisms, decided it would make an appropriate but meaningless background gag. After cutting the word out of the instruction sheet, he made copies and used rubber cement to paste "Potrzebie" randomly into the middle of Mad satires.
[edit] Appearances
The word first appeared in the letters column in Mad 10 (April 1954) in response to the question "Please tell me what in the world 'Furshlugginer' means." The editors replied: "It means the same as Potrzebie." Actually, "furshlugginer," also spelled "ferschlugginer" or "fershlugginer," is a Yiddish word meaning "confounded" or "darned" and was used in that sense in Mad.
Potrzebie was first used in a story in Mad 11 (May 1954), where it was the exclamation of a character who spoke only in foreign languages and song lyrics, in "Murder the Story," a parody illustrated by Jack Davis. It was used again in Bernard Krigstein's "From Eternity Back to Here!" in Mad 12 (June 1954) on an airplane advertising banner. With the same type font, it reappeared in Jack Davis's "Book! Movie!" in Mad 13 (July 1954), pasted into a panel as the title of an abstract painting seen in the background. It was illustrated as a rebus in "Puzzle Pages!" in Mad 19 (January 1955). These stories, like others in Mad comics, were written by Harvey Kurtzman. Frequent repetition gave it the status of a catch phrase or in-joke among the readership which continues to the present day. In the first Mad Style Guide, edited by Bhob Stewart in 1994, the word was made available for display on T-shirts and other licensed Mad products. It also sees occasional use as a metasyntactic variable by hackers.
A typical appearance of the word is exemplified by the Mad version of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (from Mad 43, December 1958), which begins:
- "Whon thot Aprille swithin potrzebie,
- "The burgid prillie gives one heebie-jeebie.
[edit] Unit System
In issue 33, Mad published a partial table of the "Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures", developed by 19-year-old Donald E. Knuth, later a famed computer scientist. According to Knuth, the basis of this new revolutionary system is the potrzebie, which equals the thickness of Mad issue 26, or 2.263348517438173216473 mm. A standardization in terms of the wavelength of the red line of the emission spectrum of Cadmium is also given, which if the 1927 definition of the Angstrom is taken for the value of that wavelength, would equal 2.263347539605392 mm.
Volume was measured in ngogn (equal to 1000 cubic potrzebies), mass in blintz (equal to the mass of 1 ngogn of halavah, which is "a form of pie [with] a specific gravity of 3.1416 and a specific heat of .31416"), and time in seven named units (decimal powers of the average earth rotation, equal to 1 "clarke"). The system also features such units as whatmeworry, cowznofski, vreeble, hoo and hah.
According to the "Date" system in Knuth's article, which substitutes a 10-clarke "mingo" for a month and a 100-clarke "cowznofski", for a year, the date of October 29, 2007, is rendered as "To 1, 190 C. M." (for Cowznofsko Madi, or "in the Cowznofski of our MAD." The dates are calculated from October 1, 1952, the date MAD was first published. Dates before this point are referred to (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) as "B.M." ("Before MAD.") The ten "Mingoes" are: Tales (Tal.) Calculated (Cal.) To (To) Drive (Dri.) You (You) Humor (Hum.) In (In) A (A) Jugular (Jug.) Vein (Vei.)
[edit] Other media
The word had a great impact among readers, as evidenced by jazz trombonist Bob Brookmeyer's tune "Potrezebie" [sic], recorded on the album The Dual Role of Bob Brookmeyer (1954), reissued on compact disc in 1992.
"Potrzebie" became the default password for the #1 (which is "God" or the root account) user account in several MUSHes and MUCKs (e.g., PennMUSH, TinyMUCK, Fuzzball MUCK and TinyMUSH).
Other odd words favored by Kurtzman and popularized by him through their use as running gags in Mad were veeblefetzer, axolotl, hoohah, furshlugginer, Moxie, ganef and halavah. (Many of Yiddish or Jewish origin).
In the Bill Griffith comic strip Zippy the Pinhead for 27 February 2007, Zippy and Zerbina mention both potrzebie and axolotl in a panel captioned, "They like to use out-of-date words and catch phrases."
Google's calculator can perform conversions between potrzebies and other units.[1] It uses a value of 2.2633 mm for the potrzebie and 36.42538631 g for the blintz, which gives a density of ~3.14179465 g/cm³ for halvah.
