for Shep fans

[kip_w]

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"Excelsior, you fathead!"

One of radio god Jean Shepherd's verbal tchotchkes was the "brass figligee with oak-leaf clusters" (spelling taken from a book about him). I've never heard anyone say where that came from. And now I don't have to, because I saw. This Smokey Stover Sunday page not only has, in the last panel, the words "phippled figliggies," but has an arrow going from those words to some small, enigmatic objects that must just be figliggies. Phippled, no less.

This ought to get me that Pulitzer.

edited for metallurgic reasons
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Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Bronze (or silver) star is an army medal, and additional awards add oak-leaf clusters, so that's part of the source as well (maybe that's already obvious to everybody paying attention).

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Well, it never hurts to point stuff out*. Okay, maybe it does sometimes, but it didn't this time. Sometimes they had clusters, and sometimes they had other things.

ACK! I said bronze? They're brass. BRASS. Must edit.

ed: [*Okay, maybe on Usenet.]

[derelf.livejournal.com]

God bless the the Shep that bring us home...

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Your discovery explains without explaining, really.

Anyway, good hunting.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Basic usage: Let's say it's, oh, 1964 [You don't have to actually say it.] and radio legend Jean Shepherd is doing his show, and he asks a trivia question. "I will award the Brass Figliggie with Oak Leaf Clusters to whoever is the first to answer this..." Sort of a No-Prize. Yeah, that's the ticket.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

That much was clear enough to me-- I have enough context-- but what I meant was that we now know where Shep got the phrase, but we don't know what Bill Holman meant by it, not even whether the figliggies are the triangular things or the cloud-shaped things in the picture, much less how phippled ones are different from unphippled ones.

However, those who cannot be at peace with this ambiguity should not have become Smokey Stover readers, I suppose. Notary sojac, dude.

Once upon an evening (have I told you this before?) I sat backstage, twiddling my mixer for the college radio station, and watched Jean Shepherd hold an audience in the palm of his hand. He played them like a fine instrument. He could draw a tiny chuckle, or build to a crescendo of hysterical laughter.

I decided that night that I wanted to be a monologist when I grew up.

This did not quite occur. I do tell a story now and then.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I should have known.

I don't think you told me that one before. I have friends who will envy you if I remember to tell them about it. Me too.

[meggins.livejournal.com]

Smokey Stover. Oh my, wasn't that a blast from the past. At least for me. I can't recall the last time I'd seen that comic before today. I can say, looking at it now, that I probably missed most of the humor (puns) in it when I was a child.