Category Archives: Folk speech

Fuck Around, Fuck Around Go Home Crying

Text: “Fuck around Fuck around go home crying”

Context: My dad, 60, white, living in Washington State, learned this in college, it was his set design teacher’s favorite saying. It’s about when you’re painting and it doesn’t look quite right so you try to fix it but it goes badly and you keep fixing it and fixing it but it gets so bad that you’ve gone completely away from what you wanted. You just spent way more time trying to fix something then you did just continuing to paint. So this saying means: Stop, just stop, leave it, go do something else, go find another area to paint. My dad brought it home and it became a part of the family vernacular. 

Analysis: This is an example of folk speech, a saying that is meant as a warning or advice.  It is unknown if my dad’s teacher created this saying or learned it from somewhere else, but since he learned it in this context that will be analyzed. Artists are known for being non-traditional, alternative, or off the beaten path. This saying reflects that, in its use of tabooist language, swear words. My father and his teacher might have been drawn to it because of this subversion. It is a saying meant to teach and my father learned it in an educational setting but it is not appropriate for kids. I think that is part of the fun, many sayings are all ages but this one ensures that the space is adult only, in the context my dad learned it in that these college kids are adults, and art is a serious business. The repetition also makes it fun to say, excluding the need for any rhymes and making it easier to remember.

Biscuits – Dance

Phrase: calling sickling your feet “biscuits”

Alternate Phrase: Huckleberry Fin

Context: The informant, 21, white, grew up in Southern California, is a dancer, they explained that in dance: “there’s this thing that you can do with your feet, it’s called sickling your feet where like it’s basically like the opposite of pointing them, you know you point your feet and if you sickle them you like turn them like in toward like the inside of your feet and it’s really bad for you and it’s like a big no no in dance, like really big no no in dance. And it’s like it used to be a problem in like one of the dance teams I was on where like people would like get up from the floor and would like sickle their feet like as they were doing it, um my dance teacher used to call, she’d be like would be like telling us not to do it and she’d be like correcting us or whatever and she would call them “biscuits”? She was like don’t have biscuit feet.

Laughter

And to this day I don’t know what it means (laughter) or why they’re called biscuit feet but she was always like, I don’t want to see little biscuits out there don’t be doing that.”

Interviewer: “Have you heard anyone else use it?”

Informant: “Ummm I don’t know if I’ve heard anyone else use it. The other thing she used to call it was huckleberry fin. Like she would be like don’t be like little like huckleberry fin like when you’re gettin’ up and I did hear others dance teachers call it like, be like don’t be like huckleberry fin which I have no F*cking clue why that’s what that is. Isn’t that hilarious?

So now I say it to my dance students and like don’t be a huckleberry fin.”

Analysis: This is an example of specialized folk speech used to teach children about a specific part of dance. Ballet is a dance form that is difficult and requires dancers to start early, so it makes sense that phrases would evolve to help children remember certain elements. Sickling your feet is easy to do and requires training to learn to point your feet in the right way, the phrase “biscuits” naturally evocates a sense memory of taste, sight, and smell, making it easy to remember for children. It’s also cute and a little funny, potentially making the frustrating experience of learning a new skill easier for the young ones. 

The phrase Huckleberry fin is a little bit more up in the air. It may be a reference to the sickle sometimes used in farming, but according to the internet (I unfortunately have never read Huckleberry fin) a sickle is not a prominent tool in the story, I don’t even know if it is mentioned. But either way it is a fun way to teach an important concept to young children.

Finish Your Food, Children Are Starving

Text: My father, JW, was told by his parents in Ohio in the 1970s, whenever he refused to finish his dinner: “Finish your food, there are children starving in China.”

My mother, IW, who grew up in suburb of Beijing in the same decade, was told something similar: “把饭吃完，美国还有小孩没饭吃” (bǎ fàn chī wán, Měiguó hái yǒu xiǎohái méi fàn chī), literally: “finish your food, in America there are still children with no food to eat.”

Both invocations were performed at the dinner table. Both intended to produce guilt in a child sufficient to clear the plate. 

Context: In Ohio, JW’s parents and grandparents drew on a long American tradition of using China as the reference point for starving children. In Beijing, IW’s parents drew on Cultural Revolution rhetoric, in which capitalist America was officially characterized as a place of mass inequality and hunger. My parents realized this surprising symmetry in their respective childhoods after they had married. 

Analysis: The mealtime “starving children” phrase is a textbook example of folk speech functioning as parental disciplinary technique. What is notable here is the mirror: in the same decade, parents in Ohio and parents in a Beijing suburb were deploying the identical rhetorical structure with the other country supplying the sympathetic reference point. In the United States, China is the pitiable other nation filled with hungry children, in China, it’s America. The form is highly stable across speakers, the only thing that varies is which country gets named, which is itself dictated by where you are sitting at dinner. It’s very interesting to me this convergent evolution from two sides of the world of deploying guilt and sympathy against stubborn children. 

“Just a Little Something I Learned in the War”

Text: My good friend KH, who has never been in any war, has installed the line “Just a little something I learned in the war” as a personal signature, dropped after she performs an act of trivial competence. Two recent examples: following up a successful U-turn in her car, “Just a little something I learned in the war.” Another, she twisted off a stuck cap from a soda bottle with some difficulty and said, “Just a little something I learned in the war.” She uses the line straight-faced, without further commentary, which usually makes it even funnier.

Context: KH does not appear to have inherited the phrase from a parent or grandparent; she has identified social media (primarily TikTok) as the point of contact, where the formula has circulated as a stock comic move. 

Analysis: The catchphrase is a piece of folk speech that works through deliberate, comedic over-attribution: KH credits a tiny bit of everyday competence to a vast, unverifiable, fictitious, catastrophic past. The joke depends on both speaker and audience knowing there was obviously no war. The gap between the trigger (a U-turn, a bottle cap) and the dramatic framing is the entire setup. It’s like wider American comic phrases such as “Vietnam flashbacks,” “Back in ‘Nam,” “in the trenches,” and “old Army trick.” All these dresses something small in the language of something terrible and huge, for comedic effect. 

年年有余: A Fish for the New Year, and Not to Flip It

Text: On Chinese New Year eve my family eats a whole fish for dinner. The rule, as enforced by my mother IW, is that we must eat the fish from the top down. We never flip the fish over. To flip the fish, 翻 (fān), invokes 翻船 (fānchuán), to capsize a boat. If you flip the fish, you’re putting yourself at increased risk of capsizing your boat in the following year (valid for car analog also). Halfway through the meal, once the top side has been eaten down to the bone, we carefully lift out the spine in one piece and lay it aside, exposing the meat of the underside. The fish doubles as a pun in Chinese: 年年有余 (nián nián yǒu yú), translating to “may every year have surplus,” works because 余 (yú, surplus) sounds like 鱼(yú, fish). Hence “may every year have fish”. The fish must remain partially uneaten at the end of the meal, leaving leftovers for the next day (the first day of the new year) to literalize the surplus. 

Context: My mother, IW, grew up in a suburb of Beijing and has not deviated from the tradition since. She has done it every Lunar New Year I can remember. We typically have two fish over the holiday: one served on New Year’s Eve and another on New Year’s Day, we call the second fish leftovers even though I’m not sure that’s how it works traditionally. The fish at our table is most often halibut, this is tangential to the tradition and just a habit my family has fallen into (I think Costco has a good deal on halibut around that time), the strict tradition would call for carp or sea bass. 

Analysis: Two folkloric mechanisms run in parallel inside one piece of food. The first is homophonic word-magic: 鱼sounds like 余, so the fish itself becomes a small, uttered wish for surplus, and the requirement that some of it remain for the next day extends the wish across the new-year boundary. Homophonic mechanisms like this are common in Chinese culture, an artifact of the language’s limited distinct syllables that lend to a high density of homophones. The second: flipping the fish, enacts, in miniature, the boat-capsizing it warns against, and the taboo presumes the small gesture is continuous with the larger outcome. The careful spine-lift halfway through dinner is the practical accommodation of the rule, with the skeleton removed in one piece so every side of the fish can be reached without ever turning it over. The capsizing prohibition is, in origin, a coastal-fisherman’s taboo that has been carried into Lunar New Year practice throughout China, and in our household, a boat-less one, it has been extended to cars. Strict tradition can involve carp (鲤 puns with 利, profit), the species drift to halibut in my family is folkloric variation.