Zzz is an onomatopoeic representation of snoring. It was commonly used in media where sound effects were not an option, notably in comic books. Henry David Thoreau was the first writer to represent nonvocal sounds with the letter Z, but he was writing about the sound of crickets, not snoring.
There are no firm rules about capitalizing zzz. Do you have any insight on to when it was first used? Scott Mitchell: The only thing I've found after 30 minutes. I'm not convinced this very pat explanation is sufficient. The person who added [citation needed] to the Wikipedia article agrees. I've never heard any snoring that sounds like [zzzz]. The sound requires conscious tongue positioning and vocal cord vibration to produce, which is difficult to do while unconscious.
Epic I tell you. It is more like "snnCHHhkkkk,,,phsawwww" : — horatio. Show 5 more comments. Matthew: the brain wave is particular important when people refers to sleep.
It's a matter of perspective, I guess. Of the dozen or so clinical uses in the Wikipedia article you linked to, sleep isn't even listed. But it's fine, I don't need to convince you, I just wanted to point out that "people send out brain waves when they are sleeping" makes it sound like EEG activity only happens when you're sleeping; the fact is that it happens all the time.
I think what he's saying is that brain electrical activity is pretty much the only activity during sleep. Hence the electrical symbol lightning strike which resembles and is substituted with is Z. Like dreams happening due to electrical brain activity. When I first saw Zzzz in cartoons I was a child, with no english knowledge. It's the shape rather then the sound, that I could associate it with sleep.
I think it's the shape took the most important place to make Zzzz be world-wide accepted. Show 1 more comment. Featured on Meta. Now live: A fully responsive profile. Linked 1. Related Hot Network Questions. Sleep Like a President. Recent posts. My Wish List. Last Added Items. Add to Cart Add to Cart. Remove This Item. Onomatopoeia is a contentious issue in linguistics for many of the above reasons. One of the factors important to language — at least according to some — is that vocabulary is arbitrary.
That means the words we choose to describe an object have no basis in what the object is. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Still, other linguists would say that this is in itself arbitrary and humans are hearing what they choose to hear. The great thing about written language is that it provides a history of terms. The Washington City Paper did a thorough job searching for the first instance of Z being used for sleep. The author of the piece, Cecil Adams, quickly realized that there was something that all of these early instances of zzz had in common: comics.
Adams, scrolling through early 20th century comics, eventually landed on a comic from the Katzenjammer Kids. The comic, started in by Rudolph Dirks, was one of the earliest successes in American comics, though Dirks himself was German.
He did a lot to create the medium as it exists today.
0コメント