Monthly Archives: May 2015

“Ka le” or “Kale” in the DOTA 2 community

As of recently, when encountering a period of lag spikes during a match (especially if a professionally competitive one), players would often type in all-chat “ka le”, or more popularly, “kale”, instead of simply typing “lag”.

THE CONTEXT

The community revolving around the e-sports game DOTA 2 is an incredibly international one. The game, which has as of now more than 12 million unique users every month, is immensely popular in not only North America and Europe, but also Brazil, Russia and China.

The Chinese teams play an especially important role in professional DOTA 2 tournaments. A nation that has had arguably the most endearing interest in the game’s predecessor, DOTA 1, its professional DOTA 2 teams are unsurprisingly amongst the world’s best. As a result, it’s becoming increasingly common for western tournaments to contain matches that are essentially “Chinese derbies” – matches where both teams were Chinese. This also, of course, incites in the western audience as well as the media an interest in Chinese DOTA 2 tournaments.

It’s not surprising then, to see Chinese DOTA 2 phrases adopted into the western scene. “Ka le” are the pinyin expressions of the Chinese characters “卡了”. The first character, “卡”(ka) means lag, while the second character “了”(le) is a modifying character that indicates past tense. Therefore a translation of “ka le” would be “there was a lag”.

As the Chinese DOTA 2 scene became ever-so-increasingly popular, this expression became known as well. However, the expression would never have become truly popular in the west, particularly North America, were it not for the coincidence that “ka le” bears such a striking resemblance to an infamous/famous word in our language (especially nowadays), “kale”.

So it happened. Many western players now, professionals and amateurs alike, type in all-chat: “kale” instead of “lag”.

THE INFORMANT

The informant is currently a student in university. We were teammates together on our DOTA 2 team. As of now he has been a player and an active participant in the community for 3 years.

He learnt of this folkspeech through in-game experience; he was watching a live-stream of a tournament match, during which the players on the western team used this phrase during a pause. Later in one our team’s matches he told us about this experience.

ANALYSIS

This is an intriguing example of how one culture’s folklore or joke can come from a translation and its subsequent misinterpretation o2f another culture’s common phrase.

UFO Sighting

UFO Sighting:

G.H.: This was about, uh, 1974, or ’75. Back in the day, there weren’t many houses around here. I used to live in Hawaii, then I came back, and I was visiting my Mom and Dad, on Bloomwood over there. I had a dirt bike, and I took it, rode with J. He had a dirt bike. We rode them over by the quarry, you know, the quarry by Portuguese Bend. One day, we ride bikes, and we’re up by the Army radar tower up there, at the top by the road Crestwood, in RPV. So I stopped riding, and he did the same thing. So he said, what’s that? I was looking at the ground, because I thought it was a rattlesnake. So we’re looking at, our view is from Newport Beach to Malibu, and up in the sky are two white dots. I was guessing they were probably jets flying around. And they’re over Long Beach. And they’re going really slow, moving towards the north, and kind of like where Lomita and Harbor Freeway, downtown Los Angeles, and there, one of them stops, and the other one keeps going slowly, and when the one moving gets over LAX, the one that’s stationary goes “Shoom!” And in the blink of an eye, picks up the same position, and they go off. Really fast, like nothing I knew was possible.

ME: Very quickly, then.

G.H.: Yeah, just like this, so they’re over Long Beach, Downtown is in the distance, and this one’s almost from Malibu to LAX, and “Shoom.” To this day, I have looked out the windows to see if I could see something like this again. Never seen a damn thing.

 

G.H. describes a UFO sighting he has never forgotten, since believing the appearances in 1974 or 1975, while dirt biking with a relative.

The Red Whistle

MG describes an urban legend from her home town of Bergenfield, New Jersey in the 60s and 70s.

MG: “There was a deli in town that also sold candy, I think it was called Bob’s. The urban legend was that if you went into the candy store and asked him for a red whistle the guy behind the counter would go crazy and chase you out of the store. It was a dare if you could go into the store and ask him for a red whistle. It was mainly a boy thing, I heard about it from my brother. He did it once.”

What happened when your brother did it?

MG: “He got chased out of the store! He had to run for his life! But that was part of the fun, he was a grown man and the boys were in 8th grade, no one knew why it was a trigger point but it was the standing challenge so all the boys had to do it”

So no one knew why he would chase you out of the store?

MG: “I don’t think so, maybe someone 10 years older than me knew but all I knew was that you had to go ask for the red whistle. Someone told me it was because he was a child molester, but I don’t know if that was true. All the kids that I knew knew about it”

This legend was interesting because it was an example of how it is unclear whether the legend or the action came first. It isn’t clear whether the man would chase kids out of the store because he had been asked about the red whistle so many times and was fed up, or if there was an underlying meaning to asking for the red whistle that made him angry in the first place. The addition of the fact that they thought he was a child molester was a weird twist and maybe made their actions more ethical: they could continuously bother him because he was a bad guy.

 

Skiing down a mountain

JG describes a game she learned from her mother and would do to kids she babysat

What was skiing down a mountain?

JG: “So you know how little kids love to be bounced up and down on people’s knees? Skiing down a mountain was basically just bouncing a little kid on your knee but with a background story. Mom used to do it to me, but she was the one who made it up. She said she wanted to put a background story to it to make it more interesting because it made more sense if there was a story. And then I really liked it so I would do it to kids I baby sat and you when you were a baby”

What do you do?

JG: “So you put a little kid on your lap and bounce them around like normal, but then you say “skiing down a mountain” again and again. Eventually you yell “TREE!” and you swerve your knees to the side like you’re avoiding a tree. There was some other ones too, like rocks and moguls. For moguls you would do really big bounces. It was kind of open to interpretation. All the little kids loved it, it was a lot more exciting than regular bouncing a kid on your knee. Sometimes I’d do you and your cousin Louisa at the same time, you guys loved it. I just remember really liking it when I was little and I would watch Mom do it to Justin too when he was little. So then I did it when I started watching kids”

This piece of folklore displays the importance of regional differences. While bouncing a child on your knee could be adapted to have many different stories, it’s significant that this story involved skiing, mainly because the game originated with JG’s mother in Colorado where skiing is very prevalent. A child would immediately recognize the parts of the game because most children in Colorado learn to ski at a very young age.

The Westridgettes

CH went to an all girls private school in Pasadena, California.

CH: “So basically since we didn’t have a football team or any men’s sports teams we didn’t have any cheerleaders cause there was no point ya know? So we had something called the Westridgettes, there were 9 skirts that each meant something different. There was the Asian skirt, the glee club skirt, the captain skirt, the soccer skirt, the drama skirt, the tiger, and the skinny bitch skirt, the preppy skirt, and the black girl skirt. We told administration the skinny bitch was something else though cause they wouldn’t like that. Basically all of them were seniors but every year they would will them down to a girl in the class below them and every girl would add her name to a pleat of the skirt. So it was like a green skirt covered with names and the people who wore them were basically cheerleaders that would lead the pep rally and would do a provacative dance in front of the whole school to show how cool and fun they were. There was a lot of nepotism, the cool group of girls would have the skirt and pass it sown to other cool girls in the younger class. But then adminstration caught on and made them diversify the skirts so it went to a bunch of random people.

Why do you think this tradition started?

CH: “I think to enhance school spirit which is hard at an all girls school. We didn’t have any big football games or anything so it’s hard to have school spirit at an all girls school. Probably like fostering sisterhood too and creating a tradition of passing down the skirts”

I think this is an interesting initiation ceremony representing the liminal time of high school. Especially since the skirts are largely exculpatory, it creates a sense of being included or not. It makes sense that the “cool” girls would be selected because this ritual allowed them to join a lineage and stand out from other girls.