This is almost a general question but it really is mindless.
In my youth I read Mad magazine (I particularly enjoyed the movie sendups) and I remember seeing three words that I never, ever saw anywhere else.
I can also never remember all three of them at once. The two I remember at the moment are “potzrebi” and “fershluggener.” I am now trying to remember that third word. As soon as I remember it, I will forget at least one, and possibly both of the other two.
(Uh, I just realized this sounds like a “say the secret word and you win a duck” kind of a post. It’s not. Really. Nobody wins anything. Just come up with the word and nobody gets hurt, okay?)
When I was in college, someone went around writing “potrzebie” all over the fershlugginer place. Still a yiddish word from MAD was a lot more interesting than the farshimmelt graffiti from two years later, when some fakakta schlamiel scrawled “Who Is John Galt?” on the all the buildings. Oy vey.
Man, this stuff takes me back. As an aside, is “fershluggener” a real word? I’ve used it all my life, taking the *Mad * definition from context, but does it have a root in the real world?
Nitpick: That’s “Nov Schmoz ka pop”. My uncle still uses this.
“Poiuyt” was created by running their finger backwards across half of the top line on a keyboard. They used the name for that optical illusion that looks like a slotted flat at one end and three pipes at the other. Apparently they paid some artist for it, then found out he hadn’t created it. But when they premiered it, it showed up on the cover of Mad. For year you’d find it lying in random p0laces in the magazine, like in a Mort Drucker movie satire.
Kinda like Arthur, the plant. Or the Mad Zeppelin.
In this old thread which had a lot of posts relating to The Far Side, there were also quite a few MAD references. Might be fun to look at some of them there.
I just did a search on “bottles axoltls wandered clod” and checked some of the hits, including a neat WIKI article on axolotls. One of the old MAD poems about axolotls is what made me select that as the missing word in the OP.
