Talk:Dingbat (disambiguation)

Untitled

In the UK a dingbat is a puzzle, where a word is represented using letters and fonts. Some popular examples are:

o er t o           - painless operation

GR 12" AVE         - one foot in the grave

        gesg
        segg
        gegs
        gges               - scrambled eggs

        k k
        c c
        u u
        t t
        s s
word word word word    - too stuck up for words

poFISHnd           - big fish in a small pond

I plan to radically change this page to match WP:MOSDAB and am saving the original here:

A dingbat is an ornament or spacer used in typesetting, sometimes more formally known as a "printer's ornament"
Dingbat is also a slang term, used to describe someone who has a silly, foolish, or clownish demeanor. It was a favorite insult of the fictional character Archie Bunker in the 1970s television show All in the Family (particularly when addressing his wife, Edith).
Cartoonist George Herriman had a newspaper comic strip called "The Dingbat Family", as it was originally of a small size so that printers could use it to fill space on the comics page like a dingbat. "The Dingbat Family" was an ancestor of Herriman's most famous creation, "Krazy Kat". The comic strip may have influenced the slang usage of the term "dingbat" as given above.
The Dingbats of Danger Street were a DC Comics kids' team created by Jack Kirby.
There is a board game called Dingbats, in which players must solve rebuses. Following its release, rebuses in this style enjoyed a revival of interest in the UK and the word dingbat was used to describe them. Their popularity peaked in the 1980s, but they still appear in national newspaper's puzzle sections.
Dingbat (building) also refers to a building on stilts with room for parking underneath, a style of architecture common to post-war development in Los Angeles.
In South Africa (at least), a Dingbat was a popular toy in the 1970s. It was made up of a hard plastic bat connected to a ball with an elastic string.