I expose the truth about the mass delusion of DST, daylight saving time–before I’m too sleep-deprived. There may be Cajun French involved. And kitchen items. I’ve said too much already.

Link to video

Closed-captioning (CC) and transcript available.

Have trouble figuring out the days of the week? You need The Calculendar!

This TV-commercial parody was inspired by the lyrics

Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday
Today it is Friday, Friday [. . .]

Tomorrow is Saturday
And Sunday comes afterwards

from Rebecca Black’s song “Friday” (which was written by adults not by the young singer).

Link to “The Calculendar” video

Closed-captioning (CC) and transcript available.

You don’t need to watch the original video first, “Rebecca Black – Friday – Official Music Video,” but here it is:

Link to music video

Steven and Brandon have a misunderstanding. Can you spot the ambiguity?

Link to video

Closed-captioning (CC) and transcript available.

After a short, original light-verse poem, hear about Christmas and Japanese New Year’s and learn some Japanese words related to New Year’s.

Link to video

Closed-captioning (CC) and transcript available.

Link to video

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”).

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; William Safire (1992) spelled it “Lupner” in On Language; Not! New York Times Magazine. March 8, 1992, 20.) 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)

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)

• 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.

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.