Even the tiny gags in the banner, different each time but always a sly extra comment on the week's situation, showed a master's touch.

People noticed. "He is a good worker only he ain't got brains!" the Professor says in the last panel of that first strip. It didn't take long to come up with a better ending. By the third strip, October, 15, 1911, Greening shortened the line into cant more appropriate for both the snazzy slang of the day and the Professor's dialectically mangled English. "Brains he has nix!" Not only would every strip thereafter end with that line, but two months later, on December 10, 1911, the phrase got incorporated into the strip's title.

And became a national catchword apparently instantaneously. The Paper Maker's Journal, published in Albany, NY, got in a reference to Percy as early as their February 1912 issue from their Ryegate correspondent:

Once we possessed a mighty baseball team,

Some say it was killed by kickers;

Next season we hope to see the rooters stream

On to the field to cheer the stickers.

You've probably heard of the Ryegate Band,

Its music fills the air;

But George C., with fiddle in hand,

Has them all beat when he plays Robin Adair.

The Woodmen are a mighty clan,

Chock full of slippery tricks,

Something like "Percy, the mechanical man,"

But brains they have nix.

The June 1912 issue of the Michigan State Medical Journal reprinted a speech given before the Muskegon-Oceana County Medical Society on March 22, 1912, by Lucy N. Eames, M.D. Dr. Eames spoke on "Clearer Diagnosis and Simpler Treatment," manifestly pressing issues at the time. While lamenting the tendency to self-diagnose serious diseases as "just a little kidney trouble," she says:

Reason, after all, is the most cogent aid to diagnosis. To weigh the worth of each sign and symptom and bit of evidence to formulate a clear idea of the morbid process going on, even though we do not name it, take[s] grey matter, and also we sometimes think of ourselves as "Poor Percy! Brains he has nix!"

Dr. Eames was Pathologist at the Hackley Hospital, a gleamingly modern institution in Muskegon, MI, a bustling small city of 25,000, one of two women on a staff of about 30, the other being Dr. Lunette I. Powers, Head of the Gynecological Dept. (If I were to write a comic book my first move would be to steal the name Lunette Powers for my superhero.) The Journal also noted that they were welcoming women doctors to attend a banquet for them as part of a medical conference to be held in Muskegon in July. Dr. Eames must have been an fascinating person; she certainly had an interesting sense of humor. Using a comic strip reference in a serious talk was dangerous territory for the sententious profession; expecting it to be recognized shows the power and ubiquity of comic pages in 1912.

A little later, the July 1914 issue of the Leather Workers' Journal threw in a random admonition for worker safety, based on Percy's propensity for leaving the scene in shambles:

Another thing, for God's sake, don't mix up matters here by trying to do things on your own hook. For in some things it seems you are like the mechanical man Percy - "Brains you have nix." Enough said.

Of course Percy is guilty of the opposite: always obeying what the instructions say, rather than varying from them when they are contrary to what the instructor meant. The subversion of the strip lies in Percy's perfection as servile yet effortlessly efficient, undoubtedly instantly understandable to workers of the day as a parody and critique of Taylorism. That ism was comprised of the preachings of the efficiency expert Frederic Lewis Taylor, who told industries to find the one best way of doing a job and thereupon force workers to adhere to it without question and at the highest possible speed. Taylorism was hated by workers in all trades, and his brand of extremism is discredited in this era of worker input and continual improvement even on once supposedly mindless tasks like assembly lines. Taylorism was the bane of the working-class readers of comics. His adherents served beautifully as symbols of righteous pomposity that comics characters were invented to knock down a peg, continually. Percy himself embodied Taylorism at its worst. The best workers were those who understood context and adapted behaviors circumstances changed, not unthinking robots. The Professor, as human as the rest of us, notably always blames Percy for the damage, never himself.

Nobody else is quite as kind, with bankists, bakists, sailists, warrists, storekeepists, waitists, actists, farmists, policers, and poeters all turning with fury upon the Professor after Percy wrecks their lives and livelihoods. Nobody suffers as much or burns with such comic rage as his "olt collech" chum, Professor Vogner, introduced on November 5, 1911. Vogner is the necessary companion, the foil who can accompany the Professor out into the world past the shops of Broadway or visit him inside his home, broadening the range of comic possibilities. Over the next year, Percy’s more-than-human strength and stamina reveals his superiority at ice skating, sledding, archery, curling, golf, fishing, bowling, baseball, tennis, and leapfrog. His inhuman competence destroys them one and all.

That joke wasn't new in 1911. Greening probably thought of it as an old cliché, ripe for variations on the theme. He had even used it before, to start off the Joco and Jack strip, for which he drew this single piece on July 10, 1904. In this instance, Joco, a monkey, is given one of Dr. Thomas's Famous Energy Tablets. He proceeds to exurberantly wreak the entire office, always smiling. Greening must have always remembered the possibilties, for this is Percy in all but name.