Category Archives: Folk speech

“One man always lies” Riddle

Nationality: United States of America
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Berkeley, CA
Performance Date: 05/03/2021
Primary Language: English

Main Piece:

“Ok, wait, so you’re in a prison, there’s two knights guarding two doors. One always tells the truth and one always lies. One of the doors leads to your freedom, and one leads to instant death. What is the one question you ask to get to freedom? You can only ask one question to one of the knights.”

“So the answer is “Which door would the other knight say leads to freedom?” Because if you ask the knight who tells the truth, they would point to the door that leads to death because that’s the door the liar would point at, and if you ask the knight who lies, they’ll lie and say the knight who tells the truth will point at the door that leads to death. Either way, you’ll be able to figure out which one leads to freedom.”

Context:

 The informant is my friend. He is a sophomore at UC Berkeley and is Jewish. He has been sharing riddles with me since high school. This information was collected during a FaceTime call. 

Analysis:

This is a very classic riddle that embodies the concept of “multiplicity and variation.” I have heard versions of this riddle that take place at a fork in the road, in a basement, and even in space! This riddle is even featured as a part of the plot in the movie Labyrinth. Even though the setting of the riddle changes, the core stays the same. There is always one person who lies and one person who tells the truth. Additionally, no one knows where this riddle originated, which further cements this riddles place as a part of folklore. 

Keartes, Sarah. “How to Beat the LABYRINTH Two-Door Riddle.” Nerdist, Geek Sundry, 14 Jan. 2016, 4:30 pm, nerdist.com/article/how-to-beat-the-labyrinth-two-door-riddle/.

Acquire Proficiency: The attitude of “Git Gud”

Nationality: South Korean
Age: 26
Residence: Chicago, IL
Performance Date: 4/15/21
Primary Language: English
Language: Korean

Main Performance:

In 2009 a videogame called Demon’s Souls was released on the Playstation 3 and its relatively unforgiving difficulty made it a surprise hit with the gaming community worldwide. A sequel was promptly made in 2011, Dark Souls, and it launched the “Souls” series’ popularity skyrocketing, with the game’s difficulty being put front and center for the masses to challenge themselves against the experience. The series still continues to this day, the latest release being Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice in 2019 which went on to win Game of the Year despite many complaints about it being “too hard”.

The important stuff begins here, as difficulty is apparently relative and many people playing these games definitely struggled, but with different parts. Certain boss fights were easy to some, impossible for others, and the differences in these opinions led to many arguments and name-calling online, jeering others for their apparent lack of skill. What was for sure though was that the game was definitely beatable and not impossible as many newcomers to the series would claim. To trivialize entire paragraphs of complaints online, a phrase would become adopted to shut down these walls of text with two simple words: “Git Gud”. A bastardized spelling of “Get Good”, it has become a popular and incredibly simple, rather dismissive command to simply become better at the game, lest they be given another insulting phrase such as “mad because bad”.

Background:

The informant, AK, is longtime friend of mine who I bonded with over videogames and other entertainment mediums. He is also incredibly well versed with deck-building in trading card games and particularly loves to be “annoying” type of player who is much more focused on entertaining himself than worrying about winning or losing. The Git Gud phrase as leaked into many other skill-based mediums be it card games, traditional video games, and any other competitive activity requiring strategy and good timing.

Context:

When memes were on the table for the project, I pondered with my friend over which were the ones that were most relevant to our own experiences and these were the results of our brainstorming.

My Thoughts:

The meme is very personal to me and my friend as these games in particular have been becoming less and less common. Difficulty in games is a point that I am heavily opinionated on and I firmly stand on the side that difficulty is an inherent game design choice and part of an experience is overcoming the obstacle and the fun comes from the satisfaction of beating it. While there are some merits to the arguments about unfair design or arbitrary difficulty, there definitely should be more scrutiny under which these sweeping generalizations are made for a given title. I am particularly against the wave of “casualization” that hopes to give accessibility for the sake of catering to the widest audience possible by watering down mechanics and difficulty for the sake of easier digestion. Dedication and investment into self-improvement, even digitally, should not be compromised or derided. While the phrase itself is dismissive, it mostly applies to those who have given up too quickly and are quicker to judge a game’s difficulty as a flaw on the game’s design than any personal shortcoming of their own.

Polish Proverbs: Lying and the Vertically Challenged

Nationality: Polish
Age: 25
Occupation: Medical Student
Residence: Poznań, Poland
Performance Date: 04/18/2021
Primary Language: English
Language: Polish

Main Performance:

  • “Kłamstwa mają krótkie nogi”
    • Transliterated Proverb
      • Kłamstwa = Lies
      • Mają = Have
      • Krótkie = Short
      • Nogi = Legs
    • Full Translation: Lies have short legs
      • Explanation: Lies travel upon weak and flimsy foundations that are will undoubtedly be discovered and be caught up to by a regular pair of legs.

Background:

The informant is one of my close friends from my Catholic high school who I maintain contact with after graduation. He hails from a devoutly Catholic Polish family. Among most of the families that I knew of while attending, most of my classmates did not speak their family lineage’s mother tongue except for most of the my Polish and Hispanic classmates. No German and definitely not any Irish being spoken there.

Context:

My informant is currently attending medical school in Poland and I reached out to him through social media to ask if he had any traditional/folk-things he could share with me given his actively apparent and practiced Polish heritage, doubly so now that he is back in Poland.

My Thoughts:

The act of lying is universally considered a negative and this would definitely would be a virtue that is practiced in a Catholic home. This would especially be effective as a warning to children to discourage them for lying as they would easily be found out. When I first heard it I thought it was referring to the legs of a table instead of legs on a human being. By being such a small table, I thought the proverb detailed that lies made for flimsy foundations instead of being short legs that cannot run very far. I’m not sure if a variation exists for the phrase about how lies eventually becomes truths if one repeats it enough and how that correlates to the quote.

Winning or Losing, English or Japanese, just shout “Let’s Go, Justin!”

Nationality: American
Age: 26
Residence: Chicago, IL
Performance Date: 4/30/21
Primary Language: English

Main Performance:

Not pictured/heard: The audience absolutely losing it

NC: I think it was in 2004 that happened, you know Moment 37

YJ: The Daigo parry?

NC: Yeah and you hear someone in the audience go, “Let’s go Justin!”

YJ: What about it?

NC: I was studying tech on the videos on twitter last week and saw someone shout it during another tournament match.

YJ: So?

NC: It was in Japanese, dude. There wasn’t even a guy named Justin playing, they just say that whenever something exciting happens.

Background:

The informant is my friend, NC, who I have spent an inordinate amount of time together with playing fighting games and going to tournaments around the country with. The particular bit he heard was from a twitter-video. The Moment 37 and Daigo parry that was mentioned refers to a particular match between two incredibly talented fighting game players Justin Wong, representing America and Daigo Umehara, representing Japan. Both their characters are at incredibly low life and Daigo’s character is a slight breeze from losing the match, even blocking an attack would lose him the round. Justin Wong realizes this and goes in with a super-move, a 15 hit attack that will surely kill Daigo’s character, as someone else in the background shouts “Let’s go Justin!”. Instead of dying however, Daigo’s character performs a frame perfect parry, pressing the buttons at the exact time Justin’s character lands their kicks on his own character. 15 frame perfect parries later, Justin is defeated and the crowd, who at this point were already losing their minds, erupts in an an even louder cheer.

Context:

I asked NC if there were any “cultural” phenomena within our preferred entertainment medium and we recalled an exchange we had about this particular incident a couple years ago.

My Thoughts:

Even when Justin Wong was the one who lost the match in a spectacular fashion and even when there could possibly be no Japanese person traditionally named Justin in Japan, the phrase itself has gained an iconic status even among the Japanese who were in attendance watching the match in 2004. It feels hilarious to me that the name in the phrase was inconsequential to the emotions that were present when the phrase was uttered. Moreso than ever with the proliferation of internet culture and archived footage of old events, new generations of video-game players can see with their own eyes of what happened in years past. However, the expansion of social media and owned content as also made it so that longer videos of events are not often caught on camera and while it is easily shared between others some content or entire accounts with videos become terminated for a variety of reasons such as proper ownership and the likes. Moment 37 has since become a legend on its own where something of its difficulty in a tournament setting has not been replicated since and the rising industry of E-sports has seemingly come to “own” these types of content. Daigo hismelf and his story beyond this single moment has been published into a serialized comic book series.

For anyone curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzS96auqau0

Are you something to write home about?

Nationality: Polish
Age: 25
Occupation: Medical Student
Residence: Poznań, Poland
Performance Date: 04/18/21
Primary Language: English
Language: Polish

Main Performance:

  • “Jak cię widzą tak cię piszą”
    • Transliterated Proverb
      • Jak = How
      • cię = you
      • widzą = they
      • tak = see
      • piszą = they write
    • Full Translation: How they see you is how they write [perceive] you
      • Explanation: The proverb refers to how one presents themselves outwardly are what people will think of them as a whole. One should endeavor to try and make themselves presentable not in a way to impress others but to more accurately reflect who they really are on the outside lest they give off a negative impression of themselves.

Background:

The informant, JK, is one of my close friends from my Catholic high school who I maintain contact with after graduation. He hails from a devoutly Catholic Polish family. Among most of the families that I knew of while attending, most of my classmates did not speak their family lineage’s mother tongue except for most of the my Polish and Hispanic classmates. No German and definitely not any Irish being spoken there.

Context:

My informant is currently attending medical school in Poland and I reached out to him through social media to ask if he had any traditional/folk-things he could share with me given his actively apparent and practiced Polish heritage, doubly so now that he is back in Poland.

My Thoughts:

How one outwardly appears is what people will consider him on the inside. The proverb tells me that it was said for people to act more honestly with themselves to other people instead of putting on fronts to pretend to be who they are not. It comes off as sound advice but has a judgmental tinge to it by how it seems to suggest that “what you see is what you get” sort of denotations from it as well. I think the quote is another that can be used on the youth to promote honest growths in personality and accepting others, to present the best version of themselves so that the good person that an individual knows that they are inside can shine forth without any misrepresentation or misinterpretation. It is rather beautiful in a way despite being simple suggestion to present oneself as best as they can be as to not have any wrongful slander made against them.