Category Archives: folk metaphor

Bengali Insult

Nationality: Bangladeshi-American
Age: 19
Occupation: College Student
Residence: Atlanta, GA
Performance Date: April 20, 2017
Primary Language: English
Language: Bengali

My informant is the daughter of immigrants from Bangladesh, and a close friend of mine. She has often told me of the unique Bengali insults and phrases that her family would use with each other. Here is a notable example:

আপনি একটি গাভী ডিম ডাল মাথা হয়

Āpani ēkaṭi gābhī ḍima ḍāla māthā haẏa

Literal translation: “You are a cow’s egg vegetable head”

My informant expressed to me that she was unsure if it was a widely used Bengali phrase, and it would be difficult to find out with a simple google search, but she assured me that most everyone in her extended family uses this phrase. It simply means to refer to someone who is insignificant or idiotic.

I might classify this phrase as a “surrealist insult”, as it seems to be a string of words tied together with little meaning outside of simple degradation.

Camel and the Arab

Nationality: Indian
Age: 77
Occupation: Anesthesiologist
Residence: Glendale, CA
Performance Date: 4/24/16
Primary Language: English
Language: Hindi

One very cold winter night, this Arab was riding camel and he was feeling very cold, so he pitched a tent, lit a fire inside the tent, and he tied the camel outside the tent. And he was warming himself up inside the tent. And the camel peeked in and said, “Please can I just put my nose in the tent, because my nose is feeling very cold and it will warm up the air I’m breathing.” So Arab said, “Okay, just the nose.” And then the camel said, “You know my ears are buzzing because of the cold breeze, could I just put my ears in?” So Arab thought, “Yeah, why not, there’s plenty of space in the tent, you can put your ears in.” And then the camel said, “You know my neck is cramping because of the cold breeze, can I just put my neck in?” Arab said, “Yes, there’s space for your neck.” And slowly like that, camel kept requesting one leg, other leg, and slowly he threw the Arab out and sat in the tent warming himself. The moral of the story is that kindness is good but don’t be so kind that you are left in a lurch helping somebody.

My grandmother’s mother told her this story. She used to tell all eight of her children bedtime stories, and this was one of the stories she told my grandma specifically. My grandma says, “She had always told me to be kind to people, but that you first must look after yourself before you can look after other people.” I asked my grandma to recount this story, or any fable with a moral she’d heard growing up, and she shared this one that her mother told her. I asked her if she thought of the fable often, and she said yes. She was close with her mother, who passed away not long after I was born, long after my grandmother had brought her mother to California from Mumbai.

Mascotgate

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/19/17
Primary Language: English

This was told to a group of friends while talking about funny or weird high school experiences.

“So at my high school, at the end of junior year, you pick a mascot, and the mascot is a mix of a pop culture figure and an animals, so like “Swanye West” or Swan F Kennedy, and i don’t know why those are both swans but those are easy, but um, uh, one time they did a movie, “Fight Cub”; “Moose Lee”, “mean squirrels”, um, and so you then you use them for your senior mascot and you get shirts based on that, and you also your yearbook will be entered on that, so when they did “moose lee” they made it look like an action movie, so like first people submit things and then we all vote on them, and the largest vote was “Genghis Kangaroo” like Genghis Khan and a kangaroo, um, and this had been submitted, and voted for number one, and it works like you vote for one and whatever gets the most votes wins, um, but then, oh yeah, so I was on term council which is like student council for each grade, and people were really mad, like I don’t want this, it can’t be Genghis kangaroo because I hate it but he’s also a mass-murderer, and like a pillager and a rapist, and we don’t want Genghis Khan representing us, and like all of those are obviously fair arguments, but like you could have said this at any point, like Genghis kangaroo could have been taken out at any point and we didn’t have to wait until it won, for then everyone to say why it’s fucked up? and then, we had a bunch of meetings at term council for what to do, what won the democratic vote, and there have always been rumours that it is a “termocracy” meaning that term council did shit without consulting the students and that we didn’t care about them, which was crazy because the meetings were open, so like anyone could come, so then you chose not come, and then we make decisions, and then you get mad about those decisions? so then we had a forum. and the forum on whether to like, like a forum to vote on whether we should re-vote and like take Genghis kangaroo out or go to the other high vote, and then on the high school meme page, there was a shit ton of memes, like conspiracy theory memes that were like, like “we’re going to have a forum to vote on whether to have re-vote a second forum for the first forum to vote on the third forum” and just like wrecking term, and like wrecking all the things that we were doing, because like what else do you want, because if we had just chosen ourselves and didn’t have a forum then they would have said “termocracy” but like when we had the vote on the revote they said this is nonsense and i think what ended up happening is that we had a forum and we just ended up going with the one which was the number two, which was TroutKast, which was a combination between Outcast the band and trout the animal, which was really good and everyone loved and  mascots were trout with the outkast costumes and then the yearbook got to be like a road trip, album tour type thing, like a cross-country tour. So it worked out.”

Analysis:

To me, what is most interesting about this story is the folklore that spread through the students through their “Meme page” as way of communication. The dubbing of the student council as a “termocracy” also shows the different levels of students and their awareness of the world, as if high school is like a much smaller country and the leaders are turning it into a dictatorship.

Goin’ Cattin’

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/21
Primary Language: English

This was told to me after I asked about the informant’s shirt. The shirt had some slang that I was unfamiliar with. The informant is from rural Eastern Oregon.

“Um, so basically, my slang is “Cattin’” like “Cat-ting” like cats and felines because we have a lot of cats around the house, they’re all outside, and we and my sister are bored, we’ll be like “hey, wanna go cattin’?” which means we go outside and find all the cats and pet them and have fun with them. And then, that’s cattin’. My sister made me a t-shirt for Christmas one year”

Analysis:

Although a very niche reference, the whole family and the informant’s wide range of friends have taken on this piece of slang and are able to reference it when relating to the informant. This shows how slang can move very easily between groups – now he uses it in college as well which means it has reach an even larger audience than just in rural Oregon – all the way in southern California.

I’ll Hug Your Neck

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: April 25, 2017
Primary Language: English

Informant:

Reid is originally from Memphis, Tennessee, but moved to Los Angeles right before he started high school.

Original Script:

Reid: “In the South, one thing that people would say there but I have never heard anyone say here is the phrase ‘I just hugged her/his neck.'”

Context:

To “hug someone’s neck” means to either say bye to someone or to say hello to someone.

My Thoughts:

When he said the phrase, I initially thought it had some sort of sexual connotation, for hugging or kissing a neck usually has some sort of sensual anterior meaning. It always blows my mind when I hear something that comes from a different part of the United States that I do not understand, for I often forget that there are so many different cultures within the umbrella of the American culture.