Today is the last day to get your submissions in for Shimmer’s Clockwork Jungle Book special issue.

This is going to be a spectacular issue. Just wait until you see the art… So, hurry. Finish that story and submit.

The intarwebs use the word sockpuppet to mean someone who has created a character for the purpose of supporting his or her arguments by pretending to be someone else. Let’s take a look at that term, shall we?

Most puppets fall into five basic categories broken down by the method in which they are manipulated. You have hand, shadow, string, rod and body. There are endless combinations of those forms, plus sub-categories and also some puppets which defy categories.

In addition to this, you also have overt puppetry, where you see the puppeteer, and covert, where you don’t.

Now Bert, over there on the right, is what we’d call a moving-mouth, hand and rod puppet. He’s not sock puppet, but they’re both operated the same way. Typically, you don’t see the puppeteer with these puppets.

A ventriloquist’s dummy is, by necessity, overt. The puppet itself might be a hand and rod, or it might simply be a rod puppet with a trigger control to work the mouth. Charlie McCarthy worked like this. He’s what you think of when you think of a ventriloquist’s dummy.

Jeff Dunham on the other hand, uses a variety of puppets, including a puppet that is very similar, structurally, to Bert. (He’s hilarious, by the way.)

And then there’s Shari Lewis who used, yes, a sock puppet.

The thing is that ventriloquism is a performance technique wherein a single puppeteer tries to create the illusion that there is another character on stage. This character gets to say things that the manipulator can’t say. Sound familiar?

Sure, sock puppets are less expensive to build than a traditional vent’s dummy BUT I do have to defend sockpuppets from the charge that they are not convincing and poorly done. That’s amateur sockpuppetry and amateur ventriloquism is even less convincing. Nothing is quite as distracting as watching someone who is trying not to move their lips and failing.

Professional sockpuppetry can be really quite lovely. Check out the Lady from Sockholm for example. Heck, Kermit is only one step away from sock puppet.

I don’t expect to actually change anyone’s mind about this, because sockpuppet is more fun to say than vent dummy. While I personally think that vent dummy is a better term than sock puppet, fun trumps accuracy almost any day.