Potrzebie


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.

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, 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.

Appearances

Potrzebie was first used in a story in Mad 11, 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 on an airplane advertising banner. With the same type font, it reappeared in Jack Davis's "Book! Movie!" in Mad 13, pasted into a panel as the title of an abstract painting seen in the background. In the same issue the word appears as POTS-REBIE, emblazoned on a cauldron in which Robinson Crusoe is roasting a frankfurter. This piece reappeared in one of the earliest Mad paperbacks, Bedside Mad It was illustrated as a rebus in "Puzzle Pages!" in Mad 19. 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, which begins:

System of measurement

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 2.2633484517438173216473 mm, although a digit was mistakenly dropped and the thickness appeared as 2.263348517438173216473 mm in the MAD article. 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 Ångstrom is taken for the value of that wavelength, would equal 2.263347539605392 mm.
Volume was measured in ngogn, mass in blintz, and time in seven named units. 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, was originally rendered as "Cal 7, 201 C.M.". The dates are calculated from October 1, 1952, the date MAD was first published. Dates before this point are referred to, tongue-in-cheek, as "B.M." Later Knuth preferred 0-origin indexing, so October 29, 2007 is now rendered as "Cal 6, 201 C.M.". The ten "Mingoes" are: Tales Calculated To Drive You Humor In A Jugular Vein
Google's calculator can perform conversions from the potrzebie system to other units.

Other media

The word made an impression on many readers, for example jazz guitarist Jimmy Raney, who recorded the tune "Potrezebie" on the album The Dual Role of Bob Brookmeyer. In the late 1960s, "Potrzebie" was a Jeopardy category.
"Potrzebie" became the default password for the #1 user account in several MUSHes and MUCKs.
's Zippy
Other odd words favored by Kurtzman and popularized by him through their use as running gags in Mad were veeblefetzer, axolotl, hoohah, osszefogva, bitsko, furshlugginer, Moxie, ganef and halavah. Many of these are of Yiddish or Jewish origin.
In the Bill Griffith comic strip Zippy for February 27, 2007, Zippy and Zerbina mention both potrzebie and axolotl in a panel captioned, "They like to use out-of-date words and catchphrases." The word was also featured as the title of the May 30, 2018 strip and again on September 8, 2018 and January 5, 2019.
In "Agatha H. and the Clockwork Princess," the second of the novelizations of Phil and Kaja Foglio's "Girl Genius" webcomic, the character Herr Doktor Potrezbie Spün is one of the many footnoted references.