Lisa the Iconoclast
The episode features two neologisms, embiggen and cromulent, which were intended to sound like real words but are in fact completely fabricated (although it was later discovered that C. A.
Hollis Hurlbut, the curator of the society's museum, appreciates Lisa's enthusiasm and grants her access to Jebediah's possessions.
While examining his fife, she finds a document inside that purports to be a confession of his secret past as the vicious pirate Hans Sprungfeld, as he was known until 1796.
He had attempted to kill George Washington while the latter was having his portrait painted, and later wrote and hid his confession, confident that no one in Springfield would ever find it.
Hurlbut dismisses the confession as a forgery, and Miss Hoover gives Lisa a failing grade for writing her essay about it, accusing her of political correctness.
Seeing a copy of the unfinished Washington portrait in her classroom, and remembering a dream in which he urged her to find the "one piece left in the puzzle", Lisa realizes how she can establish the confession as authentic.
She returns to the museum and matches its torn edge to that of the portrait, proving that Jebediah had written it on a scrap of the canvas that got caught on his boot when he escaped after failing to kill Washington.
The missing silver tongue is found in one of the museum's exhibits, stolen from the coffin by Hurlbut in an effort to protect his own career and the legend of Jebediah.
For example, a man in the crowd looks at the camera, some of the people are wearing wristwatches,[7] McClure's stuntman does not have the same sideburns as he does, and a boom microphone can be seen entering the frame.
[3] Hurlbut mentions the American revolutionaries William Dawes and Samuel Allyne Otis as equals to Jebediah Springfield.
[1] When Lisa passes out the "Wanted for treason" posters, it is a reference to those featuring John F. Kennedy, which were circulated in Dallas prior to his assassination.
[1] The opening couch gag shows the Simpson family in blue boxes similar to the style of The Brady Bunch.
[7] When Lisa is telling the people at Moe's Tavern about the real history of Jebediah Springfield, they all sit with their mouths open.
[7] When Homer knocks over Ned Flanders in order to take over his job as town crier, it is a reference to the film National Lampoon's Animal House from 1978.
[8] Lisa's decision to hide the truth to preserve the legend of Jebediah Springfield is a reference to the film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
In addition to these cultural references, at least one author has compared this episode to Friedrich Nietzsche's short work On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life.
DVD Movie Guide's Colin Jacobson lauded it for the focus on Lisa, commenting that "Lisa-centered episodes tend to be preachy, but I suppose that's inevitable given her character.
"[11] In addition, John Alberti praised the episode in his book Leaving Springfield as "an especially cromulent example of the narrative fissuring and disruptive disclosure...Lisa spends the entire episode uncovering the truth about Jebediah and courageously defending her findings against a phalanx of authority figures...a symbol of honesty, integrity, and courage.
"[12] The authors of the book I Can't Believe It's a Bigger and Better Updated Unofficial Simpsons Guide, Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood, thought it was a "clever" episode, and highlighted Lisa's fantasy of the fight between Springfield and George Washington as "fantastic".
Embiggen, coined by writer Dan Greaney,[3] is a verb meaning 'to make larger';[17] its morphology (em- + big + -en) is similar to that of enlarge (en- + large).
[21][22] In particular, embiggen can be found in string theory, as in the journal High Energy Physics in the article "Gauge/gravity duality and meta-stable dynamical supersymmetry breaking", which was published on January 23, 2007.
Bill Oakley, Josh Weinstein, Jonathan Collier, Yeardley Smith, Mike B. Anderson, and David Silverman participated in the DVD's audio commentary.
