Yes, it sounded like “black pacca” to me as well. What they meant by that, it’s hard to tell.
I always understood the opposite – pica was the larger type (10 characters per inch versus elite, 12 characters per inch). So one would prefer pica to pad out your term papers. The quoted wiki excerpt seems to agree with that.
…because Jay Ward might’ve used an obscure word like “pukka.”
I may have gotten that backwards. It’s been 3 decades.
Sounds to me like “pica”. Vowel pronunciation can vary quite a bit regionally and it sounds very much to me like a New England long i. I would be curious to know where the voiceover guy was from.
The VO guy was William Conrad, who was from Louisville, KY…but here he was putting on a fake accent.
Starting at 0:12 in the link in my original post, there is this joke: “…it wasn’t long before they were bombarding every spot on the globe <BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!> generally causing a terrible nuisance!” (City is blown up, leaving only a crater.)
That’s a similar brand of humor to: “…and there in black Pica…” (describing giant headline as using a very small font).
So that’s another supporting argument for “Pica.”
You’re kidding. William Conrad as in “Cannon”?
Yes! The very same.
The point is, “black pica” is a joke. It’s an oxymoron.
If he’s referring to the headline, no definition of “pica” makes any sense whatsoever. “Pica” is not so much a font as a font in a particular size, that would not be used in a headline. “Black” doesn’t change that.
Obscure joke, fine. Let’s move on.
How about an even more baffling joke, which can be found in the same linked video around 18:30.
Rocky: “Monte Cristo was here”. Do you know what that means?
Bullwinkle: Yeah, it means someone was in here making sandwiches!
Explain.
Cmdr. Peter Quincy Taggart’s favorite!
My guess: the writers wanted a typeface but only knew that typewriters use “pica” without knowing exactly what it meant. They misremembered it as “paca” (or something similar) and put that into the script.
The show wasn’t like the NY Times or CNN, where they have layers of editors and fact checkers.
Slip-ups can happen at any stage. In 1955 the SF radio program “X Minus 1” dramatized a story called “Man’s Best Friend” (no, no dogs). I listened to a tape recording of it many times when I was young. In the program, a character clearly says, “The polo will probably be around to hail their new leader soon.” For many years I had no idea what “polo” could mean here, but it seemed to refer to crowds of people. Finally I located the story in Galaxy magazine at the Internet Archive. A line in the story from the same character is (italics in the magazine) "The polloi are coming to hail their new Leader.” As in “hoi polloi”.
What happened? Was “polloi” in the script but the actor misread or mispronounced it? Was “polo” or “pollo” in the script? No way to tell now.
Well there ya go. Ignorance fought.
Except for the Monte Cristo part. Whence the name?
Gotta be the Count from the novel by Dumas.
Who was known to be fond of egg-dipped sandwiches?
Oh, the name of the sandwich. I don’t think anyone really knows other than it first surfaced in print in 1923.
OK, I just listened to that “Guns of Abalone” soundbite about 7 times in a row. He’s saying “black Pica,” now I’m sure of it! (It’s just a very strange pronunciation/reading by the narrator.)
By the way: thanks to everybody who responded to my original post! I appreciate all your input, as not knowing this was driving me crazy!