Dudespeak 2

November 15, 2009 @ 12:19 pm · Filed by under Lost in translation

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In this morning's Stone Soup, another take on that highly efficient language, Dude:

November 15, 2009 @ 12:19 pm · Filed by under Lost in translation


6 Comments

  1. J. Goard said,

    November 15, 2009 @ 2:03 pm

    Yet another middle-age confusion of teen sociolect with not wanting to participate in conversation based upon banal questions that trivialize you. Stop the presses.

    Why don't such adults figure out that they can get a lot more out of a conversation that begins with "Hey, guess what happened?" than with "Tell me about your situation"?

  2. Karen said,

    November 15, 2009 @ 3:33 pm

    Ummmm because that wouldn't be funny?

    Which should not be interpreted as construed as as arguing that this was funny, or not.

  3. John Cowan said,

    November 15, 2009 @ 4:03 pm

    Why don't such adults figure out that they can get a lot more out of a conversation that begins with "Hey, guess what happened?" than with "Tell me about your situation"?

    I don't know. Why don't teens?

    [(myl) Well, in the real world, sometimes they do.

    This strip would be less stereotyped if it showed a teenager decoding an adult's emotional life from fragmentary clues. But it's harder to put across a comic that inverts a stereotype than a comic that reinforces one.]

  4. Chris said,

    November 16, 2009 @ 3:24 pm

    No one has gotten more nuance out of dude than Tres Parker and Matt Stone. There's an entire argument scene in their movie BASEketball composed entirely of the word dude. Here is a YouTube of every instance of the word dude in that movie (the dude scene occurs at about the 1:07 mark).

    [(myl) There's some commentary by Eric Bakovic here.]

  5. ambrosen said,

    November 16, 2009 @ 7:24 pm

    Chris, following on from that, there's a great (but contains violence and nudity as well as swearing) scene in The Wire where the protagonists investigate a crime scene with the entire dialogue being variations on the word "fuck".

  6. Chris said,

    November 16, 2009 @ 11:20 pm

    ambrosen, ahh yes, the refrigerator scene, I remember it well. I freely admit that fuck is my all time most favoritest word in English. If I may get all linguisticy on this admittedly fun thread, I'd like to point out that the prosodic requirements for disambiguating these variations are interesting unto themselves. It is principally prosody (along with some facial and gestural cues to be sure) which allows us o "get" the distinctions, correct? No linguist would doubt (I hope) the critical role prosody plays in learning to parse input for humans, yet how many NLPers run learners over corpora of strictly written text with no prosodic information? Most? It's a tad unfair to "complain" about this. Good corpora are hard to find. Google may well have a trillion word corpus (see here), but it's linguistically sparse to say the least. Shameless self-promotion, I blogged about a related topic here.

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