The Myth Of Iron Man’s Solid Dick
This meme has been circulating for months on Twitter and Facebook and Pinterest and G+ and every other social media site where sharing funny pictures is possible:
It’s given added plausibility by the fact that there really are a lot of old comic books out there full of ancient slang that’s become risible due to linguistic drift. (The extended storyline about Batman’s great boner is perhaps the most notorious.)
Unfortunately, the Captain America panel is fake. It has been artfully ‘shopped. Here’s what the panel looks like where it originally appeared in Captain America #176:
There are more scans from this storyline here if you want more context or need more persuading.
The meme has circulated so widely that it has quite thoroughly polluted any searches you might desire to make with respect to whether the linguistic assertion about “solid dick” is true. But I could find no evidence that “solid dick” ever meant anything like “straight advice.” Ironically, thanks to the meme having replicated its bad information very effectively, “solid dick” now may have taken on that meaning in actual usage, even without a historical precedent. It’s unclear whether this Urban Dictionary entry (post-dating the meme’s circulation) is merely somebody extending the joke, or whether it’s a user-submitted entry by someone who has come to believe the false message in the meme. This bit of fan art, however, seems to have been created by somebody who was genuinely infected by the meme without realizing it was false.
Moral: Memes don’t care about truth. A false one can infect your wetware just as quick as a true one, or sometimes even quicker. The strongest ones can warp reality until it more closely resembles their payload. Be careful, it’s rough out there!
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=12235
However, the OED has:
dick, n4 slang.
Abbreviation of dictionary; hence, ‘Fine language, long words’ ( Slang Dict.).
1860 T. C. Haliburton Season Ticket xii. (Farmer), Ah, now you are talking ‘ Dic.’, exclaimed Peabody, and I can’t follow you.
1873 Slang Dict. (at cited word), A man who uses fine words without much judgment is said to have ‘swallowed the dick’.
Thanks, Hug! I wondered what the OED has to say, but I don’t have access.
Nothing in the OED near to the sense used in the fake above. Luckily my local library gives members online access to the OED and many other reference works.
The hilarious “swallowed the dick” OED citation is legitimate. I checked the hard copy in my own 1897 first edition New English Dictionary.
I just noticed the 1860 OED citation includes punctuation suggesting contraction: “Now you are talking ‘Dic.'” Given the OED sense of fine language or big words (not good advice) I suspect the sense is “Now you are talking dictionary” or “now you have swallowed the dictionary.”