An attempt at a defense of fart jokes

I start every post on here with an apology to the ten readers I have for not posting nearly enough so here it is: sorry y'all.

I've been keeping this blog as a formal undertaking for cataloging the bursts of creative, intelligent thought I've had while listening to top 40 radio on the drive to work or while serving bananas to kindergartners at said work but now I'm gonna try to make this a little more informal so I'll be less afraid of posting some of the weird stuff I've been thinking about.

What sparked this was a conversation I just had 30 minutes ago with a good friend about how much I enjoy looking at histories and iterations of certain types of humor. I know there are hundreds of scientific and sociological studies of the human brain and interaction with "jokes" and the behaviors and stimuli that influence laughter and silliness and good humor but I want to look at is as I always have: from the perspective of someone who doesn't really know what the fuck she's doing.

Last semester I wrote my senior thesis on Mark Twain's use of deadpan and dialect humor to convey the idea that college is stupid in a weird, reflexive fuck-you to the literature department and to the academic system that brought me so far intellectually and creatively. I learned a bunch about the southern humorists and the gold rush but I also learned that there is so much material out there ABOUT humor that is humorous in itself. I learned that humor is traceable, trendy and fun to talk about. I also learned that good humor that we find funny in twenty-twelve was around hundreds of years ago. I read texts that could have been written by my great-great-great-great-great grandfather that had me in stitches.

Well, I gave a damn good presentation that got the whole room laughing about mining culture in the mid-1800s and I kind of set the study of humor down for a few months while I regained regular eating habits and temporarily broke a caffeine addiction (which was a nice try but I'm up to 4 cups of coffee a day again).  I'm working a 9-5 this summer at a summer camp which leaves me with just enough free time to write and just enough preposterous stories to tell. I did a post about the cool shit that falls from the tongues of small beings and now I can do many more posts about why some of it is funny.

I attempt humor in all forms pretty much all day long. I love pointing out oddities and making quips about everyday life. I love speculating about humorous situations and I love making disarming jokes and thoughtful puns in every situation. I make fart and poop jokes with my summer camp kids (and my boyfriend and my best friends...) with no shame. I'm definitely not the funniest of my friends but I am part of a group who casually looks at humor's influence and attempt a half-assed dissection of the body of humor. I got to looking at where the idea of humor came from and found some really sweet connections that I'll try to make clear so just bear with me.

I took a class about John Fucking Milton  for a whole semester last year and learned way more than anyone needs to know about 17th century religious and governmental philosophy (WHAAAATS THE DIFFERENCE!!!! *BOWTIE SPIN*) and we talked a lot about "humorism" which has NOTHING to do with the humor we know today as "making a funny" but was about the 4 humors: blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm. The humors made up everything living in the universe and were combinations of the forces of hot, cold, wet, and dry. Here it is explained in squares:

Or for an even more what-the-fuck sensation, take a peep at this chart from wikipedia that gives a little more detail about how these forces of nature combined (if you're legitimately interested in it, though, I'd be glad to explain it to you over the phone or in an email or with a powerpoint presentation):

Humour	Season	Element	Organ	Qualities	Ancient name	Modern	MBTI	Ancient characteristics
Blood	spring	air	liver	warm & moist	sanguine	artisan	SP	courageous, hopeful, amorous
Yellow bile	summer	fire	spleen	warm & dry	choleric	idealist	NF	easily angered, bad tempered
Black bile	autumn	earth	gall bladder	cold & dry	melancholic	guardian	SJ	despondent, sleepless, irritable
Phlegm	winter	water	brain/lungs	cold & moist	phlegmatic	rational	NT	calm, unemotional

So here's the deal: Humans had a shitload of things happening around them that needed to be explained. 16th/17th century scientists did SCIENCE!!!  and found out that when all of these elements and temperatures and chaotic forces solidified into living being, they took the four grossest forms imaginable which, when squished together, formed a cat or something. Maybe a depressed cat.

So where is the connection between the four humors and our modern humor? I'm pretty sure doctors back in the day weren't busting their guts open when they extracted black bile from a cadaver's liver and nosebleeds weren't responsible for uncontrollable laughing. The word "humor" meaning "ha ha" comes from the same word as snot, blood, and liver juices.

Here's an excerpt from etymonline (a freely accessible website with the Oxford English Dictionary's historical etymologies for almost all words AKA MY HOMEPAGE) about "humor"

In ancient and medieval physiology, "any of the four body fluids" (blood, phlegm, choler, and melancholy or black bile) whose relative proportions were thought to determine state of mind. This led to a sense of "mood, temporary state of mind" (first recorded 1520s); the sense of "amusing quality, funniness" is first recorded 1680s, probably via sense of "whim, caprice" (1560s), which also produced the verb sense of "indulge," first attested 1580s. "The pronunciation of the initial h is only of recent date, and is sometimes omitted ...." [OED] For types of humor, see the useful table below, from H.W. Fowler ["Modern English Usage," 1926]. 

device	HUMOR	WIT	SATIRE	SARCASM	INVECTIVE	IRONY	CYNICISM	SARDONIC
motive/aim	discovery	throwing light	amendment	inflicting pain	discredit	exclusiveness	self-justification	self-relief
province	human nature	words & ideas	morals & manners	faults & foibles	misconduct	statement of facts	morals	adversity
method/means	observation	surprise	accentuation	inversion	direct statement	mystification	exposure of nakedness	pessimism
audience	the sympathetic	the intelligent	the self-satisfied	victim & bystander	the public	an inner circle	the respectable	the self

I included the chart because it's interesting not because it helps me make my poorly thought out point.

OKAY SO LET'S TAKE A LOOK-SEE. This doesn't directly draw the connection I want y'all to make but essentially, "humor" meaning "whim, caprice" came from the four body fluids. Indulging in your humors led to that feeling of whim and lightheartedness. So at face value the idea of humor came from someone really letting loose and becoming one with their snot. Basking and indulging in their blood. Now there is some innocence to this idea that people legitimately thought their liver goo made them sad and blood made them happy and I'm not just going to flat out say that humorism is concretely linked to poop jokes BUT....

These feelings were permanently linked with the oozes in the body and it's not like any normal person wouldn't REALIZE THAT. People back in the day knew that gross stuff is funny. You can easily look up jokes about really, seriously icky stuff from the middle ages. The bodily juices were humorous and a lot of people didn't overlook the fact that expelling goop from your body and then talking about it provided a good, dirty laugh.  I'm currently struggling to find the articles I should link to here but there are plenty examples of people making witty puns at the expense of humorism. Milton linked the "hot/wet" humor of blood to boners like A HUNDRED TIMES.

The word "humor," then meaning SCIENCE, has multiple connections to our joke humor. Humor came from indulging in your juices/fancies and also probably got some good help from the fact that those juices were also inherently funny.

So know that when you make poop and fart jokes they are an essential element to the spiritual philosophy of humorism and are part of the reason why "humor" got its name. So there

If you don't want to believe me or accept the god given fact that poop is related to medieval psychology then at least you learned something about why we still use the term melancholy for being sad.

Also phlegm, being cold and wet and also representing rationality and reason was the antithesis to blood (springtime's) sexy, sexy lust. Cold shower anyone?

Why I Really Hate Who Everyone Thinks I Am

My new year's resolution is to make at least five entries in this dusty webspot before the world ends or before the year ends. The yorld ends.

This is my last academic semester in "real" classes. Next semester I'm thrown to the 8th grade wolves to get (as my professor says) "owned." Next semester I will take another step towards that 6-12 teaching license I've been working for the past few years to get, another step towards being labeled an "English Teacher."

Ugh.

When I introduce my future profession I already get "Oh I have to watch my grammar!" jokes and people asking me to spell things for them. I'm assumed to be a stellar writer and I'm assumed to have a concrete grasp on who and whom (I can get it right if I have the time to think about it for more than half a second) and every single other rule of usage. I do have a pretty good knowledge of our language, how to write formally, and when to use a semicolon. Basically, I'm assumed to be the stereotypical bossypants English Teacher who makes you use correct grammar in and out of the classroom. I'm assumed to deify the old-white-bro canon of lit and I'm assumed to have some cosmic love for prescriptivism and being a complete asshole.

I have a lot of ideas about what English teachers should and should not do but most of those opinions aren't really appropriate for the content of this blog but I will say this:
English teacher or not there is no excuse no excuse to correct someone's usage or to judge their spelling outside of a formal setting. None. Lalala I can't hear your counter-argument. None. None. None. It's rude, it's awful and it makes you a bad person. Same goes for judging someone for "not reading that much" (I have enough opinions on that one that I'll probably make that it's own post).

If my students try any nontraditional usage stunts on their final drafts it's a totally different story but we're talking about speech, facebook, email etc.

I get that I'm supposed to teach my students proper handling of Standard Edited English and to guide them through the nuances of the yours and the its and the theirs. I'm supposed to show them how to analyze mood and tone in Billy Shakes. I'm supposed to hold their hands through the battle of passive voice. I'm supposed to batter their brains with how to identify gerunds, what makes oxford commas special and how to figure out what that poet-man really means when he says his love is like a summer's day. I can do all that. I can do all that damn well. I will teach them all that Boring Ass Crap with a smile on my face and genuine enthusiasm.

I'm not saying it's boring because I think it's boring. I think the difference between adverbs and adjectives is fascinating. Sentence structure and word formation are things I think about in my spare time. On my last car trip I barely talked to my driving partner because I was trying to meter Frost's "Fire and Ice" in my head. I'm saying it's boring because your average 8th grader does not give one single shit about narrative structure in The Witch of Blackbird Pond. I will still teach it but I want all of you to know that that is not the job of the English Teacher.


Listen up:


I don't know about your experience with your English teachers. If they were stuck-up and rude about prescriptivism I'm sorry. If they propped open a genuinely good book and beat that shit into your head then talked to you lecture-style about literary devices I am sorry. We're not all like that. One of the reasons I chose this career is because I remember how my 12th grade English teacher blew so hard that I had to teach myself everything from the syllabus and I ended up liking English. I even figured out how to write pretty good papers on my own. I don't want other students to have to do that by themselves. I want them to be open to the fact that English owns. English is so cool you don't even understand half of why it's so cool and that is why I'm here to help.

I want to be the teacher who sees a boy poring over a note from his girlfriend and asking his friends what they think she means by this phrase and that phrase and how she crosses her t's. I want to be the teacher who lets him keep it because I can recognize original critical analysis in a situation where it's totally relevant to the student's life.

I openly encourage experimentation with our cool language but I also recognize that it is imperative that students be able to write professionally. There is a dualism that's hard to teach to but I'm gonna try my damn hardest. I believe that it's my job as an English teacher to get kids to read and write things that actually matter (this includes writing in SEE). The things we read in English classes mattered at one point a long time ago and it's my job to make kids understand that there are modern-day equivalents of To Kill a Mockingbird, they just aren't in novel-form. I want my students to know that it's okay to say y'all. It's okay to make up words and use them all the time. It's okay to not really think too hard about your usage and spelling when you're writing a status on facebook (or a blog entry sorry if there are usage errors jk i'm not sorry).

This is turning into a rant and I don't have a very good closing statement so I'll leave you with this article that is super cool with a comment section full of people whose English teachers obviously failed to teach them to stand in awe of our language and instead taught them how to beat it with a belt until it behaved:

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2012/01/st_essay_autocorrect/

A Formal Apology and What Kindergartners Say and Why it is Cool

Hokay y'all. Remember when I had this wonderful idea to catalog all of the cool things my brain does when it comes to pop linguistics and everyday life?? That was a year ago. A year ago. It's not that I don't like posting every thought I have onto the internet  (sorry) it's just that a bunch of stuff happened and I guess I just put this on the backburner for a WHOLE YEAR. I have gotten requests from a few of you to keep this thing going and I have finally had enough mental stimulation to get this started again. Sorry for the year-long interim of nothingness but a lot has changed since then. This also means that there is a bunch of cool new language-y shit going on in the world and I'm about to tell you all about it and what my brainparts think about it!

This particular post isn't about pop linguistics but it is about some other interesting and way cool stuff
Here goes nothin':

Two months ago I got hired as an after-school counselor for a large corporation with four initials and a theme song. By some wonderful aligning of planets I got put in charge of a group of 13 5-year-old boys.

3.5 hours a day x 4 days a week x 8 weeks = 112 hours of listening to a nonstop stream of weird shit that kindergarten boys keep in their brains

I'm not an expert in the kindergarten brain, its cognitive developments or 5-year-olds' retention abilities but I can tell you all about the words that get formed by very young brains trying to make sense of the world around them.

I feel like I put the real world on hold for a few hours every day because there is no such thing as casual conversation with these small people. My portly brunette boy will march straight up to me at the beginning of the program and proudly declare "My grandpa Hank wears a wig" then take his seat at the table or throw some legos at his friend or do a handstand or any other thing that he finds appropriate to do at that moment. My job is to say "yes that's wonderful, G" and move on to counting a dozen other children who are doing similarly ridiculous things. I have no room in my brain or schedule to have a serious conversation about G's grandfather's wig even though I may have many questions about it (does it fall off often? how about when he sneezes? does he use it as a party trick? why is it so important to you? etc) but I often think about my kindergartners' outbursts as pent-up information that they simply cannot hold in their brains any longer and must let out without any expectation of further dwelling on those topics. I'll use this blog as a sort of kindergarten sayings log where I present some of the weird-ass sentences these boys construct and expel.

Some current favorites:
"In dinosaur world its another dimension you don't I don't understand it we can't understand it"
"We're blattlin' blay-blaydes"
"I lived in a candy house once but I ated it all up and we had to move"
"I brunged it. I branged it back. I bringed it back, Miss Anna"


Those last two sentences are what interest me the most (though the attempt at "we're battling bey-blades" is pretty cute.) There is a whole psychological explanation for them and I understand this but I just want to point out how cool it is that kindergartners get basic English rules of grammar because we use them all the time. In this case it's that one adds a -d or -ed morpheme to the end of a word to make it past tense.

The boy who blatantly lied to my face about his living situation wasn't satisfied with "ate" being a past tense verb so he tacked a -d onto the end and voila! Something that actually makes sense! The last example is the most impressive, though. This young man experimented with incorrect versions of "bring" (though it's easy to see why he chose "brunged" and "branged") until he found something that suited the rule of verb + /d/ = past tense verb.

I try not to correct my kids when they misspeak because hammering prescriptivism into their heads, in my opinion, will ruin their sense of wonder with our language. They can still do whatever they want with it and not only get away with it but create really bizarre forms of expression that accurately express whatever cool weird stuff happens in that five-year-old briny gray mush.


(for a cool site dedicated to small children saying silly things check out Preschool Gems.)

Explanation, not a rant

A friend of mine made a very good point after he saw this blog. With his permission I'll post part of his message to me and respond to it as a kind of explanation for how I feel about pop grammar's effect on the people who use it:

I hate the changes in modern spelling. It either grew from laziness or has beget it. I work in the school system, and the spelling of the modern youth has been completely derailed by the constant fluctuations in pop grammar. I believe heavily in the act of learning what is, and not changing pace before you've even left the gate. Not to mention that phonetics have never shifted, the words are pronounced identically to the "real" way of spelling, which makes multiple methods baseless and over-numerous. I think Twitter in itself has become a cesspool of intellectual stagnation as parroting and plagiarism have become the name of the game. This contrivance with our generation becoming THE anti-status quo has just made us a new status quo.

I'm currently enrolled in my university's teacher licensure program and the thought of teaching standard English kind of terrifies me. I've never been a stickler for prescriptive, strict grammar. I've always been interested (even obsessed) with descriptive grammar and grammar fluctuations. I feel that since our communication is changing so rapidly via the internet/texting, nonstandard usages and pop grammar are bleeding into the places that standard edited English should be used. That's when you end up getting kids using symbols, abbreviations and dialect in papers, assignments, resumes and interviews. "Teaching English" is going to resemble its namesake more than ever in the years to come because instead of honing in on proper style and refining the language it's going to be the actual teaching of the separate, foreign dialect of standard English in order for my students to succeed in the "real world." There have to be separate schemas for school/profession and casual conversation and that is something that has to be taught before we can label pop grammar changes as "bad" or "detrimental" to the language. It's not bad, it's different. We have to find a way to teach the difference between how they speak or type and how the professional world expects them to speak or type.

That is not the only problem I see, though. As we express ourselves through text we shouldn't have to feel the constant burden of conforming to the standard because people don't have the proper ways to differentiate between the two worlds. Facebook is no place for SE (except in those weird and awkward professional and academic messages when you friend a boss or professor or something). Twitter is definitely not a place for SE and we have to remember that limiting people's expression so that they can fit a standard isn't right (!imo!). I'm not going to correct myself for saying "y'all" because it is nonstandard (given, this is a very mild infraction). Better example: I'm not going to censor people for "African American English" (Hate the term, love the actual dialect) and the non-conjugation for the verb "to be" (I be going to the bathroom etc) unless they use it when standard English is formally or academically expected.

I'm looking forward to studying and sharing all sorts of awesome shit from the internet and speech but I can't say I completely understsand the full ramifications of it changing our grammar. I don't know if it's for the better or for the worse and really, who can know?

Thoughts?

Also- Here's a cool (and scary!!!) article about a similar phenomenon in China and Japan called "character amnesia"

Mind your gs and qs

I'm not going to be the person who tries to single-handedly beat down linguistic close-mindedness so this blog is going to be less about criticism and more about appreciation of linguistic phenomena.

The word "morniqq" was trending on twitter a few days ago and I delved deeper into the twittersphere only to discover that there is a whole subgroup of tweeters (and facebookers, as I have found) that replace gs with qs.

AWESOME!!
How cool is it that we can stylize our language and have it still retain value? Fuckinq awesome. Ever since we could communicate on the internet with AIM 1.0 we've been trying to think up innovative ways to make our text stand out using the only tools we have: the text itself. ReMeMbEr ThIs? Or did u type lyk thiis? Maybe you were too xxhardcorexx for that. Maybe you were a l33t h4x0r. We *still* do it (see what I did there!)

 I mean purely from a graphical standpoint that rules. q is much cleaner than g. g has a weird hook/blob thing at the bottom of it and q is a circle and a line. Clean and simple. This group has figured out a way to style their text using elements they already have BUILT INTO THE FUCKING ALPHABET to make what they say both mean something and look cool.

Remember those xs in your screenname in middle school? This is like that except instead of using letters to make words look nifty by accentuating them and adding additional flourish, this sticks that style right in the fucking middle (or end) of the goddamned word. No extra shit necessary (well, there is, but I'll get to that later)
check this shit:

This lady is a hard-working mamma with style.

Then I looked a little deeper and found that this q-as-g phenom is utilized in much more stylish writing. There's a trend on twitter where people duplicate the last few letters or vowels in a word. Cheqq it:

D:

This is a lot heavier and slower to read and I usually find myself reading it in a really drawn-out head voice. Still awesome, though. Repetition of letters just looks cool and that's enough justification it needs. 

Lastly I bring you this,

q as g, z as s, i as y, omission of vowels and at the end, who even knows. BUT I STILL LOVE IT SOOOOOO MUCH!

Sometime you should look up "omq" or "qood morniqq" on twitter or youropenbook.org and see what cool trends are popping up left and right.

CHEQQ YA'LL L8R

Excuse the gushing, I'll post the good stuff soon

I've finally gotten the guts to start a blog about pop linguistics. I'm obsessed with the language of our generation: the language of drunk i-love-you-mans, of high wait what was I talking abouts, of facebook statuses, of twitter trends, the language of the media, popular music and the constantly changing flow of language as we the teenagers and the twenty-somethings shape it.
Where better to start off than the fastest and most immediate catalyst of this hella awesome phenomenon, the interweb itself?

I guess I'm directing this towards any of y'all who, like me, are hopelessly addicted to pop culture (and who also feels the love for nonstandard English.) Anyone who listens to the hit station on the radio and revels in the sick-nasty constructions of the hip hop pioneers of contemporary language. Anyone who reads twitter trending topics just to look at people using qs as gs or listens to campus conversations just to hear the pips and quirks of student life expressed through strings of astounding swears, "yeah bros" and "gettin' schwasteds." This, however, is not solely directed toward that small group. Anyone who wants to partake should. If you have ever heard a song on the radio, a friend's ipod or seen a facebook status that made you stop and think "holy shit that's weird....but awesome!" (or even just "that's weird and dumb") this is for you, too. Anyone who wants to notice the changes, the trends and the cool as hell shit that gets posted on the internet and sung on mtv should. That's what this blog is about.

-Anna