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Bechdel Joins Goldberg in Merriam-Webster

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I hate to discuss this in relation to a man but … Alison Bechdel has joined Rube Goldberg as a cartoonist whose name is now a word in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

“Bechdel Test” is one of over 500 new words added to the M-W dictionary in September 2019.

Hat tip to Seven Days for the notice.

Thanks to Tribeca for the comic strip.

The only other cartoonist name in a dictionary as a defined word that comes to mind is Heath Robinson – that is in British dictionaries; but my (very old) Webster’s Collegiate does not have “Heath Robinson” (it does have “Rube Goldberg”).  Racking my feeble brain, I can’t think of another.

Congratulations to Alison!

 

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Comments 7

  1. Some mysteries from the Thirties mentioned a “Hokinson woman,” after New Yorker cartoonist Helen Hokinson. She drew well-upholstered women “of a certain age”; Sondheim might have called them “the ladies who lunch.”

    And don’t forget the Gibson Girl. There used to be a chain of ice cream parlors called Farrell’s that featured artwork by Charles Dana Gibson. (The last location, in Brea, California, closed this year.)

  2. Soon….

    If a Hokinson woman met a Gibson Girl, would they pass the Bechtel Test?

  4. “If a Hokinson woman met a Gibson Girl, would they pass the Bechtel Test?”

    Well…so long as their subject of conversation was NOT the Leyendecker Arrow Collar Man.

  5. D.D., M-W gives pretty short shrift to Gibson. Wikipedia, OTOH, goes much more in depth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibson_Girl

    FWIW, I think they’d fail the Bechtel Test. After all, the Arrow Collar Man was the bee’s knees. (Not that any respectable Gibson Girl would _ever_ comment on anatomy. Just the collar.) 🙂

  6. Charles Schulz was referenced by the OED for “security blanket,” when it was added in 1986, though he acknowledged the term was around before he was used it in Peanuts.

  7. Hokinson’s women were like multiple manifestations of Margaret Dumont.

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