+Postage Due+Disney-comics digest #133.

[Don Rosa]

	Such LONG digests! And yet no mention of Ariel! Please
unsubscribe me!

	I am very interested in Duck/Barks slang. One of the first
things I did 7 years ago, aside from glomming a collection of NATIONAL
GEOGRAPHIC, was to make lists of Duck slang. Later I also made copies of
the articles from various magazines describing Duck slang. And I guess
it's true that Barks incorporated contemporary slang into his stories...
but I wouldn't say he did it very smoothly. In one of his last stories
he even tried to turn Gladstone into a beatnik, and that was rather
awkward as well. Where would Barks have been exposed to such slang other
than off TV which I can only assume he watched. And yet I STILL have
always had a distinct feel from his stories that his Ducks seemed to be
speaking in the hip lingo of the twenties -- maybe because, as someone
said, his use of more modern jargon wasn't as comfortable.
	But what I'm also heading toward is this comment someone made
about Barks making a pun using Norwegian when he used a word that could
mean a cheese or could mean a direction; what's the pun? I think this
was just a misplaced hyphen... I don't think Barks knew any Norwegian. A
Norwegian fan once sent him some goat cheese (that "gjost" or whatever
-- I'm unable to go back and check the spelling), and he thought it was
reindeer cheese.
	My introduction of more slang is strictly old-time slang! That
"Great Honk!" I use now and then comes from a movie starring Paul Ford
as a well-to-do 1910-15 merchant who was often uttering such
ejaculations. Recently I've read some P.G.Wodehouse books and made some
notes on 1930s slang.

	Geir! Had I typed at you since I got back from Norway? Life
seems to be a blur lately -- I can't recall! You were busy up north that
week (in the nord-ost)? And what a kind thing you said about how you
read my stories to your kids! I love to hear that people like some of my
stories... but nothing tickles me more than hearing how parents share
them with their kids at bedtime. Great Honk, that feels nice!