Little did I know that he’d gotten a starring role in a movie.

Link to video

Closed-captioning is available. It’s actually a transcript, but it synchs up pretty well until the fast-talking end.

The folks at TomTom are selling Star Wars voices for their GPS devices and seemed to have enjoyed the making of behind-the-scenes videos of the recording sessions. The Yoda one has a bunch of funny things in it. The Darth Vader one starts out slow but gets better towards the middle (via The Nerdist and many other vias back to Carscoop).

“Yoda recording for TomTom GPS – behind the scenes”

Link to Yoda video

“Darth Vader recording for TomTom GPS – behind the scenes”

Link to Darth Vader video

As a Dutch company, TomTom is a good choice for at least the Darth Vader voicings, as vader is (I think not coincidentally) the Dutch word for “father.” Any Dutch people out there who predate the prequel trilogy and didn’t get to be surprised by the “I am your father” reveal in The Empire Strikes Back? Now you know the power of the Dark Side. As far as I know, darth is not the Dutch word for “asthmatic” (which is apparently astmatisch, among others).

“Star Wars” is still “Star Wars” in the Netherlands but would translate to the cognate Sterrenoorlogen (ster “star” in the combining form sterren and the plural oorlogen of oorlog “war”).

[EDIT (6/7/10): I broke this long post up into two posts.]

This is Part 2 (Part 1) on finding early uses of American slang and colloquialisms from the television clips and episodes on Hulu‘s (language corpus of) shows from NBC Universal (NBC, USA Network, Bravo, Sci Fi, Sundance Channel, Oxygen) and News Corp. (Fox, FX, Fuel TV).

While searching in vain for the Steve Martin “NOT!” clip on Hulu for the Part 1 post, I found another “The Nerds” sketch from Saturday Night Live and stumbled on an old usage of yet another expression. This time it was post-adjective much? (e.g. “Awkward much?” for “You’re very awkward”).

I first noticed post-adjective much? in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer pilot, (“Welcome to the Hellmouth,” Season 1, Episode 1; first aired March 10, 1997). Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter) informs Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) that there has been a mysterious death at their high school. Buffy wants to find out if it was the work of a vampire without blowing her secret identity:

BUFFY: How did he die?

CORDELIA: I don’t know.

BUFFY: Well, were there any marks?

CORDELIA: Morbid much? I didn’t ask!

(Welcome to the Hellmouth, 15:37-15:43, hulu.com/watch/48/buffy-the-vampire-slayer-welcome-to-the-hellmouth [EDIT (6/7/10): no longer available])

The construction not surprisingly predates the show, but I was surprised to find it two decades earlier.

On SNL’s October 7, 1978, episode (Season 4, Episode 1), with The Rolling Stones as host, the teen nerds Lisa Loopner (Gilda Radner; Safire spelled it “Lupner”) and Todd (Bill Murray) are hanging out in Lisa’s kitchen:

TODD: I really need your help with my history homework.

LISA: Well, Todd, you know if you sincerely need my help, you can count on it.

TODD: Oh, good. Because I’m studying all about [grabs at Lisa's shirt neck and tries to peek down her shirt] underdeveloped nations!

LISA (shouting and smiling): Cut it out, Todd! Cut it out! [lightly swats him away] Stop it!

TODD (points at Lisa’s chest and mock laughs to a pretend audience): Underdeveloped much?

(Nerds Broken Fridge, 02:37-02:55)

The bit is quite crass, of course, but there’s the post-adjective much? construction way back in 1978.

As if I couldn’t waste enough time watching comedy and other clips and episodes on Hulu, now I shudder to realize that there’s a corpus linguistics use as well. NOT! No, there truly is.

See also:
Gateway to Corpus Linguistics

Corpus.byu.edu (English, Spanish, and Portuguese online corpora)

Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon by Michael Adams (2004, Oxford University Press, ISBN13: 9780195175998)

Having trouble finding early uses of slang and colloquialisms? If you’re looking for instances of American (and possibly Canadian) ones, the television clips and episodes on Hulu from NBC Universal (NBC, USA Network, Bravo, Sci Fi, Sundance Channel, Oxygen) and News Corp. (Fox, FX, Fuel TV) are a useful language corpus.

I was sent an old clip of Saturday Night Live (SNL). The clip happened to contain a “Wayne’s World”-esque “NOT!” (e.g., “That sounds like fun—NOT!” for “That does not sound like fun”), but it’s thirteen years earlier.

I learned the post-clause NOT! expression from the “Wayne’s World” segments on SNL in early 1990. The sketches began at the beginning of the fifteenth season in Fall 1989, but I don’t think the post-clause NOT! appeared until the Tom Hanks-hosted February 17, 1990, episode (Season 15, Episode 13, video clip embedded below).

Tom Hanks plays Garth’s (Dana Carvey) cousin Barry, a roadie for Aerosmith. Barry has brought Aerosmith to appear on Wayne’s World, Wayne (Mike Myers) and Garth’s community-access cable show. After Barry demonstrates his roadie duties, comes:

WAYNE: Anyways, Barry, uh, that was really interesting. [mugging to camera] NOT!

(Waynes [sic] World with Aerosmith, 04:39-04:43)

With the movie Wayne’s World in 1992, the expression became even more popular. It even made the American Dialect Society’s 1992 Word of the Year. According to Sheidlower and Lighter (1993), however, the usage of post-clause NOT! is older than that:

The publicists for the movie Wayne’s World claim the construction was coined in the late 1970s by Steve Martin and Gilda Radner in “The Nerds,” an ongoing sketch on Saturday Night Live:

That’s a fabulous science fair project. . . . Not!

(Jesse T. Sheidlower and Jonathan E. Lighter (1993). A Recent Coinage (Not!). American Speech, 68(2) (Summer, 1993), 213-218 [first page].)

For the SNL quote, Sheidlower and Lighter cite a 1992 “On Language” column by William Safire. Safire calls it “belated negation” and gives the sketch as 1978.

(William Safire (1992). On Language; Not! New York Times Magazine. March 8, 1992, 20.)

That would be the April 22, 1978, episode (Season 3, Episode 18), with Steve Martin as host. That sketch doesn’t seem to be on Hulu. At any rate, at least my discovery is still a little older. The usage I stumbled on is from two years earlier.

In the very first season of SNL, the May 8, 1976, episode (Season 1, Episode 19) has Madeline Kahn as host. The show has a slumber party sketch about what a group of young girls think sex is:

MADELINE KAHN: That is why you should only do it after you are married. Because then you won’t be so embarrassed in front of your husband because you will [would?] be in the same family.

LARAINE NEWMAN (sarcastically, with only a slight pause): Oh, well. Now I really want to get married. Not!

(Slumber Party, 02:46-03:00.)

I can’t get too excited about this either, however. It turns out, according to Mark Israel (Postfix “not”), the construction is a lot older and goes back at least to 1905 with Ellis Parker Butler’s Irish English poem Pigs is Pigs (“. . . ‘Cert’nly, me dear frind Flannery. Delighted!’ Not!“).

Part 2:
Buffy (and SNL) ‘much’ much?: Slang research with Hulu.com, Part 2

See also:
Gateway to Corpus Linguistics

Corpus.byu.edu (English, Spanish, and Portuguese online corpora)

Straight Goods [EDIT (6/7/10): archive access requires free subscription] has a “definition list for new mothers,” with new meanings for familiar words. My favorites are:

• Family planning: The art of spacing your children the proper distance apart to keep you on the edge of financial disaster[.]
• Feedback: The inevitable result when the baby doesn’t appreciate the strained carrots.
• Puddle: A small body of water that draws other small bodies wearing dry shoes into it.
• Show off: A child who is more talented than yours.
• Sterilize: What you do to your first baby’s pacifier by boiling it and to your last baby’s pacifier by blowing on it.
• Storeroom: The distance required between the supermarket aisles so that children in shopping carts can’t quite reach anything.

Happy Mother’s Day to all who perform that vital role.

In the movie Drillbit Taylor, some high school boys are looking for a bodyguard to protect them from a bully. They settle on Owen Wilson after interviewing others like Adam Baldwin, who tells them hiring a bodyguard is a stupid idea.

Baldwin (unrelated to Alec and family) played the high-school bodyguard in My Bodyguard (1980) and wore the same kind of white T-shirt plus army-surplus jacket as in this movie.

On episode 13.1 (2008) of the Globe Trekker TV series (also known as Pilot Guides and formerly known as Lonely Planet), they traveled to Los Angeles and Hollywood and took in the L.A. County Coroner’s Office gift shop.

Along with products like dead-body-outline beach towels and toe-tag key chains was their own sign:

Shoplifters’ next of kin will be notified.

Gift Shop site: Skeletons in the Closet

It’s that time of year again. It’s time for Youtube’s sketch comedy contest: Sketchies II. Actually, “that time of year” is three months earlier this year (must be the leap year thing), as last year’s contest started in May (Summer 2007 Youtube sketch comedy contest).

You could win $25,000 (in money) and $15,000 in film-making equipment.

This time the contest is more structured. The first video, three minutes maximum, has to be about a road trip and has to incorporate a traditional musical instrument. The second video, if you’re a finalist, is to be announced.

To enter, you also have to be an adult and live in the United States.

• Open Call: Submit first video February 18 to March 3, 2008 (11:59:59 p.m. Eastern Standard Time).
• Round 1: If you’re one of ten finalists chosen by March 19th, submit second video by April 6th.
• Round 2: The winner will be announced on April 18, 2008.

Official rules

Last year’s winner was Awkward Pictures, with the videos:

“FriendBuddies” and “Rodney & Zak.”

Link to “FriendBuddies” video

Link to “Rodney & Zak” video

Don’t forget to vote in Round 1 (March 13-19, 2008) and Round 2 (April 9-15).

EDIT (6/7/10): The 2008 winner was Waverly Films for “Sherlockbot & The Case of the Purloined Piggybank.”

Link to “Sherlockbot & The Case of the Purloined Piggybank” video

Do you like The Office (US), especially Steve Carell’s Michael Scott character? Do you dislike The Office? Did The Office use to steal your lunch money?

Then you should like andsarah channel‘s And Sarah videos on Youtube.

Writer-actor Sarah Dooley and director-cinematographer-editor Rachel Mersky (kokiriforest channel) are making mock documentary videos of a deliciously annoying character’s college life.

The fictional Sarah, like The Office‘s Michael Scott, is arrogantly clueless. But she’s master of her own reality. She wells over with so much denial that low-lying islands are at risk of submersion.

I won’t spoil the best stuff, but watch in Episode 1 (“Sarah introduces her college life. Awkwardness ensues.”, embedded below) as Sarah waves and calls out to Allison, gets snubbed, and rationalizes that Allison must have thought she was waving to someone else—”also named Allison.”

Link to Episode 1 video

Then in Episode 2 (“Sarah auditions for the Vagina Monologues!”), see Sarah get called on her lies by her beleaguered roommate, only to do an English-muffin reality reset.

Link to Episode 2 video

So far there are only the two installments, but Episode 2 is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen on Youtube.

Episode 2 is funnier than the winner or any of the other nine finalists for the 2006 Youtube Video Awards: Best Comedy compare for yourself (youtube.com/ytawards?name=ytcomedy). [EDIT (6/7/10): link content gone] Enjoyable as many of those videos are, I got only one laugh out of the winning video, Smosh Short 2: “Stranded” (below), and zero laughs out of the others.

Link to Smosh’s “Stranded” video

I got two huge laughs out of And Sarah Episode 2 from the deft writing, acting, and editing. That’s, sadly, quite rare from what I’ve seen on Youtube over the last year. Watch it a second time just for the enjoyable characterization from facial expressions and body language.

Episode 1 is also very well done. I got smiles not laughs, but I loved the writing and acting (and the mockumentary style). You just want to shake the character Sarah and shout “What is WRONG with you?!” Yet somehow she’s endearing.

I confess I have a personal interest in this. The real Sarah is a busy university student. But if many people subscribe and many more watch, she’ll feel pressured to keep making videos for me and others to enjoy—instead of wasting her time learning, uh, learny stuff in schooliversity and junk.

The And Sarah show is worth checking out. Travel over to Youtube and subscribe to/bookmark andsarah channel, and bring friends along for the trip to mirth. Sarah will entertain you. But she can’t help you get back your lunch money. That’s a journey you must take alone.

Here’s a little gift for the holidays.

Fox Searchlight Pictures, the independent-film division of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, has provided free official scripts (foxsearchlight.com/awards/) [EDIT (6/6/10): dead link] for some of its comedy-drama movies, or dramedies if I may use a television term (via Whedonesque).

• Juno (nominated for Golden Globe best comedy, best comedy actress: Ellen Page, and best screenplay: Diablo Cody)
• The Savages (nominated for Golden Globe best comedy actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman)
• The Darjeeling Limited
• Waitress

Plus two non-comedy dramas:

• The Namesake
• Once

I haven’t seen any of these yet, but I’ll be renting Waitress to see the acting of Nathan Fillion, who’s great at both drama and comedy (Desperate Housewives; Serenity; Firefly; Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place).