Tintin Forums

My manager has asked me to put together some information on Tintin, including some of the well-known phrases he uses, i.e. "Great Snakes", "Jumping Jellyfish".
Please could you assist me with some more of these?
Thank you!

I’m not sure that Tintin really was one for catch-phrases, other than the “Great snakes!” you mention.

His friend Captain Haddock, on the other hand, was the one with the expansive vocabulary…

The first thing i can think of is "Great Snakes" but the other thing that comes to mind is "Crumbs!"

Thank you all! I found some others:

Blue Blistering Typhoons!
Blistering Blue Buzzards!
Ten Thousand Thundering Typhoons.
Billions of bilious blue blistering barnacles.

I don't ever remember him using "Jumping jellyfish". The difficult thing is that Tintin says a lot of things during the whole series, but he doesn't repeat very many of them.

NikkiRoux
Thanks so much, Nikki!

It’s Captain Haddock rather than Tintin who comes out with those, if your boss is strictly looking for things which Tintin says.

Captain Haddock does say “Great snakes!” once, on page 9 of Red Rackham’s Treasure; I don’t think he ever says “Jumping jelly-fish!”, although he does use both “jelly-fish” (e.g. Crab With the Golden Claws, p. 37, amongst others) and “jelly-fishes” (once, in Explorers on the Moon, p.12).

As I said, if it’s expansive vocabulary, it’s Haddock not Tintin who is the master!

Haddock does say this in the English language dubbed version of Tintin And The Golden Fleece. But I've always thought of it as one of Captain Pugwash's phrases.

There's an interesting thread here on the possible origins of “Great snakes!”, where jock and I kept coming up with earlier and earlier uses. I think we finally settled on it being an American phrase from c.1830.

Thanks to m’learned friend for the information!

It’s inevitable that, just having finished my The Complete and Utter History of Captain Haddock’s Invective in the Enlish Language list, designed to upgrade the existing guide on this site, that someone should introduce an area I’ve not looked into – I feel like Dr. Johnson in the Blackadder the Third episode (“Ink and Incapability”), when Blackadder keeps introducing new (made-up) words he hasn’t included in his Dictionary (“I’m anispeptic, frasmotic – even compunctuous, to have caused you such pericombobulation!”).

Ah well, I’ll need to take time with the movies too, at some point…!

What about:
"Jumping Jehosaphat!"-Train Engineer, Tintin in America
"Kamikazi!"-Mitsuhirato, The Blue Lotus