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

Sunday, June 8th, 2008

[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)

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Posted in Comedy / Humor Media, HUMOR, LANGUAGE, Language-Sites, Linguistics, Words / Dictionaries | 1 Comment »

SNL NOT!: Slang research with Hulu.com, Part 1

Sunday, June 8th, 2008

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)

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Posted in Comedy / Humor Media, HUMOR, LANGUAGE, Language-Sites, Linguistics, Words / Dictionaries | 1 Comment »

‘The Extensive Hip Hop Rhyming Dictionary’: Phrasal rhymes

Monday, February 18th, 2008

If you’ve been here to Language and Humor Blog before, you may have noticed a certain lack of roadway license. Er, street cred. That’s all about to change with this post about The Extensive Hip Hop Rhyming Dictionary (On-line Records, US$8.95) (on-linerecords.com/). [EDIT (6/7/10): dead link]

I’m not a fan of rap music or hip hop, but I find the phrasal rhymes very interesting. The book could be of use not only to rappers but also to song parodists (including science-fiction filkers), whose alternate lyrics often rhyme with those of the original song.

I notice that some of the examples in the book aren’t rhymes proper (same vowel sound and same final-consonant sound) but assonance (same vowel sound). For example, the phrase asthma attack rhymed with blast from the past has the “az-” of asthma and “(bl)ast” of blast. That’s assonance, but the consonant sounds are so close that it’s also an approximate rhyme. However, the “-(t)ak” of attack with the “(p)ast” of past is just assonance. With the unstressed schwa vowels, there’s also rhyme (“uh” of attack with “uh” of the), which keeps the rhythm/beat to STRESSED-unstressed-unstressed-STRESSED. The last set has the same schwa assonance as well as consonance (same consonant sound) of the initial “m” in asthma, “-muh,” and the final “m” in the word from, “(fr)um.” [EDIT (6/7/10): This paragraph edited for clarity.]

You might want this book if your level of “free flow” now is at “zero.”

See also:

Free Online Rhyming Dictionary
Rhyme with
WikiRhymer Rhyming Dictionary
Rhyme Generator

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Posted in LANGUAGE, Language Media, Language-Sites, Words / Dictionaries | No Comments »

Lingro: Free Web page translation by word and more

Friday, November 30th, 2007

You can get whole Web pages translated (Google Language Tools, Babel Fish, etc.), but here’s a free tool to translate any individual word on a Web page you want: Lingro (via Education Week).

Lingro works for English-English and both to and from English for:

  • Spanish
  • French
  • Italian
  • German and
  • Polish.

It uses the free Wiktionary dictionaries and also has an input-translator dictionary, file translator, and vocabulary study tools.

Go forth and click multiple unknown words.

Posted in English as a Second / Foreign Language, Foreign Languages, LANGUAGE, Language Technology, Language-Sites, Words / Dictionaries | No Comments »

Marathon of ‘Word Girl’ kids’ vocabulary show

Wednesday, November 21st, 2007

Look, up in the sky! It’s a . . . well, it’s a superpowered word-loving girl.

This Friday, November 23, 2007, America’s PBS public broadcasters will air a two-hour marathon of their new children’s vocabulary TV show Word Girl (check your local listings).

I’ve never seen the animated show, but the bits on the Web site are very entertaining and probably educational for elementary school children. The creators show that language is fun. The television series also offers the introduction and reinforcement of four vocabulary words per episode.

I put this post in the Humor category as well as Language because some of the animated shorts on the site made me laugh, as when the narrator explains that Word Girl arrived on Earth when her monkey crashed their space ship. The narrator then goes into great detail about how monkey piloting is a very bad idea until Word Girl, breaking the fourth wall, makes him stop (in the first Huggy’s House of Fun Freeze Frame).

If your kids are in America and are no longer drowsy from Thanksgiving turkey by Friday, have them take a look.

Show’s dictionary for parents and teachers

Posted in Comedy / Humor Media, HUMOR, LANGUAGE, Language Media, Language-Sites, Words / Dictionaries | No Comments »

Freerice: Vocabulary quiz helps UN food program

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

Do you like words? If you want to test your vocabulary and add to it while helping to feed the hungry people of the world, try Freerice.

Freerice banner

Here’s how it works:

For every correct answer to FreeRice’s online vocabulary game, the site donates 10 grains of rice to its official humanitarian partner, WFP [United Nations World Food Programme].

The money for the rice comes from the sponsors of the advertisements on the site (you don’t have to click on the ads/adverts to play). The program has recently passed the one billion mark: 1,330,639,890 grains of rice since October 7, 2007, and 136,236,930 grains just yesterday (daily totals).

The quiz is addictive for three reasons:

  1. Who wants to quit when you might know the next coming word?
  2. You can see the difficulty-level number going up and down as you get correct and incorrect answers, and who wants to quit on a lower level than you had been on?
  3. Who wants to quit when you can see the grains (literally, with graphics) adding up to be sent to starving people?

I’m not sure how long I played the first time, but I got past 1,300 grains of rice (including educated guesses and random ones) as my level kept going up and down between levels 40 and 44 (50 is the highest level and very low levels are for nonnative students of English).

According to the FAQ, the difficulty level for a word is based on how many people get it correct or not. Some of the words in the low 40s seemed pretty easy even for a well-read high-school student and some were both obscure and useless except for specialists. But it’s fun, and it’s for a great cause. Plus, they tell you the correct answers when you’re wrong. Oh, excuse me, I just got up to level 47 almost immediately. Busy now.

Banners for Web sites and forums

Posted in English as a Second / Foreign Language, Foreign Languages, LANGUAGE, Language-Sites, Words / Dictionaries | No Comments »

Free access to OUP foreign-language dictionaries 10/2007, quizzes

Wednesday, October 17th, 2007

In honor of National Dictionary Day (American lexicographer Noah Webster’s birthday), Oxford University Press USA is offering free access to its online French-English, German-English, Spanish-English, and Italian-English dictionaries (oup.com/online/freeoldous/). [EDIT (6/6/10): dead link]

This free access is from October 15 to 21, 2007.

OUP also has some short quizzes about these languages:

French Quiz

German Quiz

Spanish Quiz

Italian Quiz

Oh, and happy 249th birthday, Mr. Webster!

Posted in Foreign Languages, LANGUAGE, Language-Sites, Words / Dictionaries | No Comments »

English-dialect link roundup

Saturday, September 29th, 2007

Here are some links about a variety of dialects of English:

  • Recording Highland Scots Cromarty fisher dialect (20 short audio interviews of octogenarians Bobby and Gordon Hogg)
  • Compiling a Yorkshire dictionary (including the terms attercop, ettle, and pafalled)
  • Revising a Canadian dictionary (lengthy article, including laying claim to the terms Generation X, insulin, and possibly light bulb)
  • Remembering American old-time diner slang (heralddemocrat.com/articles/2006/12/06/local_news/news13.txt) [EDIT (6/6/10: dead link] (not really a dialect but amusing, including the terms nervous pudding, put a hat on it, and dough well done with cow to cover)

See also:
BBC Voices UK-dialect recordings

Posted in Dialects, LANGUAGE, Language-Sites, Words / Dictionaries | No Comments »

Site update: Humor about Japan / Japanese language

Friday, September 21st, 2007

I’ve started expanding this site beyond the blog. To start off, I’ve added some fun with Japanese language and culture:

  • animated GIF images
  • quizzes, some of which are based on song parodies, and
  • puns.

You can now see a link to this site’s homepage on the sidebar at right.

Posted in Foreign Languages, HUMOR, Humor-Sites, LANGUAGE, Language-Sites, Site Administration | No Comments »

2007 Talk Like a Pirate Day

Wednesday, September 19th, 2007

Arrr! Wednesday, the 19th of September be International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Talk like one or get called a bilge rat.

The day was started in 1995 and popularized by humor columnist Dave Barry in 2002, even before the Pirates of the Caribbean movies came out.

Official site
Including:
pirate dictionary and sound files of German, Swedish and Mandarin Chinese pirate-ish talk

Internet talk for pirates

See also my posts:
Arrr! Talk Like a Pirate Day 2006
‘The Pirate Primer’ book (Arrr!)

Posted in HUMOR, LANGUAGE, Language-Sites, Words / Dictionaries | No Comments »

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