Potrzebie

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Potrzebie is a Polish word popularized by its non sequitur use as a running gag in the early issues of Mad not long after the comic book began in 1952. The word is pronounced "pot-SCHEB-yeh" in Polish and is a declined form of the noun "potrzeba" (which means "need"), but in "English" it was purportedly pronounced "PAH-tur-zee-bee" or "POT-ra-zee-bee." Its Eastern European feel was a perfect fit for the New York Jewish style of the magazine.

Mad editor Harvey Kurtzman spotted the word printed in the Polish language section of a multi-languaged "Instructions for Use" sheet accompanying a bottle of aspirin, and Kurtzman, who was fascinated with unusual words and Yiddishisms, decided it would make an appropriate but meaningless background gag. After cutting the word out of the instruction sheet, he made copies and used rubber cement to paste "Potrzebie" randomly into the middle of Mad satires. For instance, in "Book! Movie!" in Mad 13 (July 1954), the word was pasted in the background under a picture on a wall. It was illustrated as a rebus in "Puzzle Pages!" in Mad 19 (January, 1955). Frequent repetition gave it the status of a catch phrase or in-joke among the readership which continues to the present day. In the first Mad Style Guide, edited by Bhob Stewart in 1994, the word was made available for display on T-shirts and other licensed Mad products. It also sees occasional use as a metasyntactic variable by hackers.

A typical appearance of the word is exemplified by the Mad version of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (from Mad 43, December 1958), which begins:

"Whon thot Aprille swithin potrzebie,

"The burgid prillie gives one heebie-jeebie.

In issue 33, Mad published a partial table of the "Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures", developed by 19-year-old Donald E. Knuth, later a famed computer scientist. According to Knuth, the basis of this new revolutionary system is the potrzebie, which equals the thickness of Mad issue 26, or 2.263348517438173216473 mm. Volume was measured in ngogn (equal to 1000 cubic potrzebies), mass in blintz (equal to the mass of 1 ngogn of halavah, which is "a form of pie [with] a specific gravity of 3.1416 and a specific heat of .31416"), and time in seven named units (decimal powers of the average earth rotation, equal to 1 "clark"). The system also features such units as whatmeworry, cowznofski, vreeble, hoo and hah.

The word had a great impact among readers, as evidenced by jazz trombonist Bob Brookmeyer's tune "Potrezebie" (sic), recorded on the album The Dual Role of Bob Brookmeyer (1954), reissued on compact disc in 1992.

"potrzebie" also became the default password for the #1(which is 'God', or the root account) user account in several MUSHes and MUCKs (e.g., PennMUSH, TinyMUCK, Fuzzball MUCK and TinyMUSH).