The Straight Dope dug up memorable public service vaccine cartoons,
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I like how folks back in my home town will say collar bone, and shoulder blade. Leave it to the aloof professionals to say clavicle and scapula.
From boyhood, I remember well a public service television commercial, animated, with diseases personified, urging us to vaccinate. Roley Polio was a menacing bald man in a wheelchair, wielding his wicked crutch. His pals were Dippy Diphtheria, Whoopy Whooping Cough and—wait for it—Locky Lockjaw, who could only grunt, in a frustrated, panicked, angry “Urrr, urrr!” because his jaw was locked tight. So scary. Nowadays the medical professionals say “tetanus.”
But why? In that distant Latin word there’s no folk history, no anguish, no sadness in the kitchen.
Vaccines are important. I recall a mother who failed to vaccinate her two children. Maybe the boy was too young to vaccinate, but he wouldn’t have caught measles if his sister had been safe. The boy died. The daughter, my age, lived to see her mother become a lifelong alcoholic who often said she would see her son again, in heaven.
This year the professionals in white wonder why we don’t get vaccinations, wonder why there are more measles in little sparsely populated Canada than in the much denser United States. They speculate that diseases have fallen out of popular memory.
“Excuse me, Doctor. You say you want people to change?…” You could start by calling a spade a spade—It’s lockjaw!
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Sean Crawford
Province of Alberta, (with 1, 891 measles cases)
North of the once-great USA (with 1,431 measles cases)
September
2025
ESSAY Blog note:
One of my fellow bloggers, at one writer per month, intently studied the essays of famous writers in My Year of Excellent Essayists.
This spring, during my evening class in essays, (at the Alexandra Writers Centre Society) our teacher, Richard Harrison, from Mount Royal University, brought us an amusing cardboard model of the standard “three point essay” and proceeded to debunk that stupid high school template. Good for him.
Say, for the curious, here’s his course: https://www.alexandrawriters.org/store/p805/your-essay-your-way-making-it-personal.html
Maybe I slept through school, but I somehow missed the common high school horror of the “thesis, three points and conclusion,” with the conclusion merely restating the thesis, but somehow using different words.
These days, I think, “Oops” and hasten to say, “non academic, non schoolboy!” after I tell people “I have a hobby of writing essays…”
