In the Chicago Reader's Straight Dope column this week, Cecil Adams investigates the origins of using Zs to indicate snoring. The earliest example that Adams and his associates unearthed is from a Katzenjammer Kids comic strip from August 2, 1903.
It so happens that August 2 is my own birthday, and Z is my first initial. I don't snore, but I am a longtime reader of newspaper comic strips, even the really stupid, glacially paced soap-opera ones like Mary Worth and Apartment 3-G. Is any of this significant? Is the CIA involved? Why did Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald? How come Greenland varies in size from map to map and why have I never met anyone who's been there? Have I been reading too much Don DeLillo?
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