THE OCALA BANNER — SEPTEMBER 21, 1906
... And the Courier-Journal came out with the dread word: “The staid old Baltimore Sun has got itself a whangdoodle. Nor is this one of those bogus whangdoodles which we sometimes encounter in the side-show business, merely a double cross between a ginricky and a gyascutis—but genuine, guaranteed; imported direct from the mountains of Hepsidam. And to give facts to the above remark it quotes the immortal lines:
“The Whangdoodle, the Ginrickey
and the Gyascutis,
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell
can hold—
That is the Whangdoodle.”
This mystifies the Sun paper. It laborously inquires, “What is a Whingdoodle?” It says, “We have heard of sharks, mugwumps, bohemoths, protozoan, heptasophs and steptococoi, but the whangdoodle is a bird that has yet to fly between us and the sun.” It then goes into the etymology business. It finds that the veb “whang” means to “give out a banging noise,” and that “doodle signifies “to drone like a bag pipe.”
We desire to add what light we can to this dark subject. The whangdoodle is not — bird at all. It is a mammal, with all the affection of the mammalia for its offspring. That banging, droning noise is the articulate voice of
