Potrzebie
Potrzebie (; dative/locative of "potrzeba", "a need") is a Polish word popularized by its non sequitur use as a running gag in the early issues of "Mad" not long after the comic book began in 1952. Origin. "Mad" editor Harvey Kurtzman spotted the word printed in the Polish language section of a multi-languaged "Instructions for Use" sheet accompanying a bottle of aspirin, and Kurtzman, who was fascinated with unusual words, decided it would make an appropriate but meaningless background gag. After cutting the word out of the instruction sheet, he made copies and used rubber cement to paste  Potrzebie randomly into the middle of "Mad" satires. Appearances. "Potrzebie" was first used in a story in "Mad" #11 (May 1954), where it was the exclamation of a character who spoke only in foreign languages and song lyrics, in "Murder the Story," a parody illustrated by Jack Davis. It was used again in Bernard Krigstein's "From Eternity Back to Here!" in "Mad" #12 (June 1954) on an airplane advertising banner. With the same type font, it reappeared in Jack Davis's "Book! Movie!" in "Mad" #13 (July 1954), pasted into a panel as the title of an abstract painting  seen in the background. In the same issue the word appears as POTS-REBIE, emblazoned on a cauldron in which Robinson Crusoe is roasting a frankfurter. This piece reappeared in one of the earliest "Mad" paperbacks, "Bedside Mad" It was illustrated as a rebus in "Puzzle Pages!" in "Mad" #19 (January 1955). These stories, like others in "Mad" comics, were written by Harvey Kurtzman. Frequent repetition gave it the status of a catch phrase or in-joke among the readership which continues to the present day. In the first "Mad Style Guide", edited by Bhob Stewart in 1994, the word  was made available for display on T-shirts and other licensed "Mad" products. It also sees occasional use as a metasyntactic variable by hackers. A typical appearance of the word is exemplified by the "Mad" version of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" (from "Mad" #43, December 1958), which begins: System of measurement. In issue 33, "Mad" published a partial table of the "Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures", developed by 19-year-old Donald E. Knuth, later a famed computer scientist. According to Knuth, the basis of this new revolutionary system is the potrzebie, which equals the thickness of "Mad" issue  26, or 2.2633484517438173216473 mm, although a digit was mistakenly dropped and the thickness appeared as 2.263348517438173216473 mm in the MAD article. A standardization in terms of the wavelength of the red line of the emission spectrum of cadmium is also given, which if the 1927 definition of the Ångstrom is taken for the value of that wavelength, would equal 2.263347539605392 mm. Volume was measured in ngogn (equal to 1000 cubic potrzebies), mass in blintz (equal to the mass of 1 ngogn of halavah, which is "a form of pie [with] a specific gravity of 3.1416 and a specific heat of  .31416"), and time in seven named units (decimal powers of the average earth rotation, equal to 1 "clarke"). The system also features such units as "whatmeworry", "cowznofski", "vreeble", "hoo" and "hah". According to the "Date" system in Knuth's article, which substitutes a 10-clarke "mingo" for a month and a 100-clarke "cowznofski", for a year, the date of October 29, 2007, was originally rendered as "Cal 7, 201 C.M." (for Cowznofsko Madi, or "in the Cowznofski of our MAD"). The dates are calculated from October 1, 1952, the date MAD was first published. Dates before this point are  referred to, tongue-in-cheek, as "B.M." ("Before MAD.") Later Knuth preferred 0-origin indexing, so October 29, 2007 is now rendered as "Cal 6, 201 C.M.". The ten "Mingoes" are: Tales (Tal.) Calculated (Cal.) To (To) Drive (Dri.) You (You) Humor (Hum.) In (In) A (A) Jugular (Jug.) Vein (Vei.) Google's calculator can perform conversions from the potrzebie system to other units. Other media. The word made an impression on many readers, for example jazz guitarist Jimmy Raney, who recorded the tune "Potrezebie" on the album "The Dual Role of Bob Brookmeyer" (1954; reissued on compact disc in  1992). In the late 1960s, "Potrzebie" was a "Jeopardy" category. "Potrzebie" became the default password for the #1 (which is "God" or the Wizard account) user account in several MUSHes and MUCKs (e.g., PennMUSH, TinyMUCK, Fuzzball MUCK, TinyMUSH, and TinyMUX). Other odd words favored by Kurtzman and popularized by him through their use as running gags in "Mad" were "veeblefetzer", "axolotl", "hoohah", "osszefogva", "bitsko", "furshlugginer", "Moxie", "ganef" and "halavah". Many of these are of Yiddish or Jewish origin. In the Bill Griffith comic strip "Zippy" for February 27, 2007, Zippy and Zerbina mention both "potrzebie" and "axolotl" in a panel  captioned, "They like to use out-of-date words and catchphrases." The word was also featured as the title of the May 30, 2018 strip and again on September 8, 2018 and January 5, 2019. In "Agatha H. and the Clockwork Princess," the second of the novelizations of Phil and Kaja Foglio's "Girl Genius" webcomic, the character Herr Doktor Potrezbie Spün is one of the many footnoted references.