Potrzebie is a seemingly nonsensical word (actually Polish), popularized by its use in the early issues of Mad magazine not long after the publication began as a comic book during the early 1950s. Mad editor Harvey Kurtzman spotted the word "Potrzebie" while examining a bottle of aspirin. It was printed in the Polish language section of a multi-languaged "Instructions for Use" sheet accompanying the aspirin, and Kurtzman decided it would make an appropriate non sequitur. After cutting the word out of the instruction sheet, he made copies and used rubber cement to paste "Potrzebie" randomly into the middle of Mad satires. It had an immediate impact among readers, as evidenced by jazz trombonist Bob Brookmeyer's tune "Potrezebie" (sic), recorded on the album "The Dual Role of Bob Brookmeyer" (1954), reissued on CD in 1992.
The word is pronounced "po-TSCHEB-yeh" and means "as needed" or "as necessary" in Polish. Frequent repetition gave it the status of a meaningless catch phrase among the readership which continues to the present day. In the first "Mad Style Guide", edited by Bhob Stewart in 1994, the word was made available for display on T-shirts and other licensed products. It also sees occasional use as a metasyntactic variable by hackers.
In issue 33, Mad published a partial table of the "Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures", developed by 19-year-old Donald E. Knuth, later a famed mathematician. According to Knuth, the basis of this new revolutionary system is the potrzebie, which equals the thickness of Mad issue 26, or 2.263348517438173216473 mm. The system also features such units as whatmeworry, cowznofski, vreeble, hoo and hah.