I'm afraid that's as language-interesting as I can be on Christmas Eve. But I wanted to say merry Christmas, happy holidays, and thanks for reading!
And for those who like animals, here's a small gift. My agent's new puppy is headlining today on Mediabistro's GalleyCat. Damn cute sight for dog lovers.
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4 comments:
I have a friend who says "and whatnot" all the time. So if you get bored, you can always switch to that.
I have also noticed that lately everyone is saying:
That's just how I roll.
I don't roll like that.
Where did this start?
The first time I really noticed "how I roll" was when Rob Corddry, then a correspondent on Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show," said that about a Hummer SUV. It wasn't the first time I heard it, but it was the first time I noticed it.
I don't know its origin, but I assume it's one of those hip hop expressions that made it into the popular lexicon via middle-aged white people who know they sound funny when they use it.
Then again, I'm just a squirrel trying to get a nut, foshizzle.
I use all sorts of goofy little expressions like this more-or-less without shame. In fact, I feel like I semi-unconsciously try to use all of them: and whatnot . . . and such . . . and the like . . . and stuff . . . and s*** . . . and things . . . and all that . . . and this and that, etc. Indeed, I think it's a reaction to having pretentiously overused et cetera (and--correctly, I hope--et al.) in my youth.
Not that that's the only classification of expressions whose silly little colloquialisms I like (I believe that that sentence makes sense even though it looks like a redundancy and might surely have been better phrased). Maybe too it's compensation for being occasionally obnoxiously sesquipedalian, yaknow, and such.
On the other point, well, it's just way too much fun for pale folk like us to pretend to be "urban." Word. Yeah, it's even goofier when it's retro urban.
So, um, yeah, I didn't really have much to say, but I kept leaving this blog marked unread in my RSS reader because I wanted to say something. And every time I came back to it, your final comment made me laugh.
I LOVE using hiphop (and early-/pre-hiphop) lingo in my normal tone of voice. One of the biggest laughs I ever got from friends was the time a group of people were discussing something controversial (I forget what) and one of the people turned to me for my opinion, evoking only my response of, "Hey, I'm just a squirrel trying to get a nut."
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