I've written previously, a few times, about language and idioms that first appeared in comic strips. For the most part, cartoonists are known for one or two things that they popularized and which have stayed around for years. Rube Goldberg had his machines, Al Capp had Sadie Hawkins Day, and George McManus had his newlyweds. Some, like Billy DeBeck, have a few more.

Then there's Tad Dorgan.

Dorgan was a cartoonist in the early 20th century who was best known at the time for his sports comic strips, such as "Indoor Sports", as well as his comic strips about dogs, like "Judge Rummy" and "Silk Hat Harry". He always signed his work as "TAD," although those were actually his initials. His real name was Thomas Aloysius Dorgan.

He is also a problem. He's credited, in more than one place, with either coining or popularizing a very large number of phrases and idioms. Some of them have gone out of style, some are still in common usage, and some have gone out of usage and have had a resurgence. As a comic strip hist…

We all know who John Q. Public is. He's the everyman, the man on the street, the guy the representatives in the government represent. He's who they want votes from. What he thinks is what politicians are supposed to listen to and build their platforms on. He's all of us. That said, he isn't just a turn of phrase, but was an actual newspaper comic strip character.

But who was his father?

The idea of a character representing the common man is traced by some back to Frederick Opper's character "Mr. Common People," a small, perpetually nervous looking man in a top hat, who appeared in many Opper political cartoons beginning in 1902. Mr. Common People is most often shown being taken advantage of by people who are far larger than he is. He is also easily identified by the large tag which always hangs off of his coat and reads "The Common People."

John Q. Public himself was created by by Vaughn Shoemaker and first appeared in an editorial cartoon in the Chicago Daily News in 1922. He appeared as a short, baldi…

One of the interesting things to me about the history of comic strips is the affect that they've had on the English language. I've written about how a cartoonist's name has made it into the dictionary, about how strange holidays have been created and named in comic strips, but actual words being coined in comic strips is a different thing. It has happened a few times, though.

I stumbled across an interesting fact when reading about the George McManus creation The Newlyweds this week. George McManus is better known for his creation Bringing Up Father, but this earlier strip is interesting in that its title makes use of a word that had not yet been in common usage.

The Newlyweds, also called The Newlyweds and Their Baby after they had one, was about a couple who had, as the title suggests, not been married long. Their names were Mr. and Mrs. Newlywed, so the title refers to a proper noun, not the common noun that we know today. It wouldn't have been a common noun, because the strip began in 1904, and at that…