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Geoffrey's Panklaggephone
by Ellis Parker Butler
If you can't pronounce it, never mind; neither could Casey. It is a sort of amateur Greek word that Geoffrey made up himself, so it would fit in the same list as telephone, phonograph, cinematograph, megaphone, and so on; and Casey was no Greek. Far from it. If you had mentioned Demosthenes and Solon to Casey he would have said, "Sure now, an' I dunno anny av thim fruit-stand fellers." All he knew about Greece was that it was somewhere in Italy, where the dagos and Portuguese come from.
As Casey came along one morning on his way to his boiler-shop he noticed that a sign was being painted on the small factory next door; and when he went home that night he saw that the sign was complete, "The Geoffrey Panklaggephone Company." By the name he guessed carelessly that it was a company to make either some new-fangled moving-picture machine or a patent medicine, and forgot all about it. When a man is trying to run a boiler-shop these days he has his hands full with that. He hasn't time to stop to stufdy out Pan -- panklag -- pan-whatever-it-is. No, sor.
The way that Geoffrey got the name was this. He looked up "noise" in the dictionary, and it didn't have a Greek root, so he found a synonym, "clangor," and he looked that up, and that did have a Greek root. He had to have Greek in the name. The word was "klagge," so he took "klagge" and tacked "pan" on one end, to mean that his machine was good for all kinds of noise, and then he stuck "phone" on the other end, because that never seems to do any harm, and makes a good ending for any sort of newfangled machine; and there he had his word --