AAUGH!!!!!

I always picture Charlie Brown, with that particular exclamation.

Probably no one ever really was in the widespread habit of saying that out loud, as a cry of anguish - not quite like that, you know? "AAUGH!!"? ...but Schultz's strip spelled it that way (with a variable number of U's and A's). Then when the animated cartoons began coming out, the voice actors delivered the line faithfully, and it kind of caught on. It became a real exclamation, suitable for people to exclaim.

More recently we've seen the same sort of thing with Nelson's "HA-hah!" and Homer's "D'oh! from the Simpsons; and "Mmm'kay" from South Park. Although of course, a few people were legitimately saying any and all of these things before any of the respective cartoons came out. But now, they've become not only expletives, interjections - they've become pop-culture references.

I love that a cry of anguish can be a pop-culture reference!

When I was a kid, my mom had kept her original Peanuts collections from her own childhood. Something like the first six or seven years of the strip. The golden years. Collectively, those strips were some of the highest art the comic strip medium has produced, and of course we kids ended up tearing those poor little books to pieces. But before that happened, I had the chance to read them all in one go!

I don't remember how old I was. I was a little guy. Old enough to be able to read, obviously, and old enough to glean the meaning of the word *sigh* from context. Charlie Brown would say *sigh* enough times to establish a good context. But I wasn't old enough to realize that it wasn't something people actually said. "Sigh!"...I didn't connect back the printed word *sigh* with that breathy exhalation of sadness, regret, resignation. So of course, I began saying "sigh!" out loud, when the context of life demanded it. In any of those sorts of *sigh*-worthy situations.

It was years before somebody clued me in. Because by then, I was way too old for that to be cute.