Category Archives: Folk speech

Coronavirus ‘Inside Joke’

Nationality: Pakistani, American
Age: 17
Occupation: Student
Residence: 11048 Washington Blvd Apt 306
Performance Date: 04/22/2020
Primary Language: English
Language: Urdu

Context: The following is a joke told by the informant, my youngest sister in a relaxed setting at home. 

Background: After work and classes were canceled, my youngest sister told my family and I this joke that she heard from her friend online. This was in the earlier days when everything had just closed down and many people were still quarantining to ensure that they hadn’t come into contact with the disease and wouldn’t spread it further unknowingly.

Main piece: 

Q: What types of jokes are allowed during the Coronavirus?

A: Inside jokes

Analysis: The joke here is obvious, with the answer of ‘inside joke’ referring to remaining inside, quarantining, and social distancing during the Coronavirus pandemic. While this is a joke about the Coronavirus, it is not one that is especially controversial or dark, focusing more on our response and measures taken than the disease itself.

Ole Miss “Hotty Toddy” Cheer

Nationality: american
Age: 24
Occupation: Sale representative
Residence: San Fransisco
Performance Date: April 19, 2020
Primary Language: English
Language: none

Main Piece: 

Informant- *Loud Shouting Voice* 

Hell yeah, damn right!!!

hotty toddy gosh almighty

who in the hell are we HEY!!!

flim flam, bim bam

OLE MISS BY DAMN!

Interviewer- Is there a specific time you sing the song? 

Informant- The song is a response to the usually shouted phrase “Are You Ready?”. It is sung every football game before kick off. As a student, we sing the song in The Grove, the Ole Miss tailgating area, and all over Oxford. I would sing the song with students in bars and on the streets of Oxford. 

Interviewer- Do you feel connected to the song or people who sing it?

Informant- Yes! This song shows my pride for my school, Ole Miss. I feel connected to our city and school and everyone who sings it. We all clearly love our school and football team. Each time we sing louder. The song usually gets pretty rowdy and the crowds go wild. HOTTY TODDY !!! 

Background: The informant learned the Ole Miss cheer song as an incoming freshman to the University of Mississippi. She learned it from peers and word of mouth. She learned that the song is sung with a loud confident gusto and usually with a group of people. A sorority member and fan of football, the informant feels great pride for her school, especially when singing the song. The song represents the community camaraderie for the school and football team.

Context: This piece was collected by the informant on April 19, 2020. She is currently an Alumni from Ole Miss and graduated in 2018. She sang the song alone in an outdoor setting. She explained that the song is usually sung in large groups at a sports gathering. 

Thoughts: The song has been sung by Ole Miss fans for generations, dating back to the mid 1900s. There is no official copyright or creation of the chat and melody. It is a fight song representing folk music of Ole Miss community members. 

Meaning Behind The Proverb “I Don’t Have to Outrun The Bear”

Nationality: American
Age: 67
Occupation: Retired Physician
Performance Date: 4/22/20
Primary Language: English
Language: Yiddish

Main Piece: 

Original Proverb: “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you.” 

Meaning as told by my informant:

“So, the story goes like this. Two men are hiking in the woods, and they see a bear. The bear is really mad, so they start running to get away. The first man says ‘how are we going to outrun this bear?’ and the other guy goes ‘I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you.’ (laughs) Because think about it. If the bear gets one guy, he’s not going to keep running to get the other. In life, it means that you don’t need to be the best, you just need to be better. I used to like telling you that when you were taking tests that were graded on a curve. If you got a question wrong, but everyone else got two wrong, you didn’t have a perfect score, but you got a hundred percent. You didn’t outrun the bear, but you did outrun the other people.” 

Background: 

My informant is my father, who grew up on a chicken farm in South New Jersey. His parents were holocaust survivors who immigrated from Poland, so growing up, he generally spoke Yiddish at home and English at school. Everyone always calls him the “walking joke book,” and he speaks more in proverbs (in both languages) than he does in normal sentences. While he doesn’t remember where he learned this proverb, he assumes it was at school, since he learned it in English. He says he likes this proverb, and all proverbs, because they’re an easy way to evoke a whole story and moral from just a few words. In addition, he just thinks they’re funny and that the world would be a better place if everyone laughed more. 

Context: 

While I’m not in quarantine with my informant/father, I do call him every day, and this piece was collected during a routine call. 

Thoughts: 

This was likely the first proverb I ever learned (I don’t technically remember learning it), and it evokes a very fond sense of nostalgia for me. I think the beauty of this proverb is its fairly dark sense of humor. The saying itself implies that someone is going to die, but an audience’s response is always laughter. It’s this weird sense of optimism because although you know someone is going to get mauled by a bear, your takeaway is that you’re going to be okay. My analysis is that depending on how you look at life, someone’s success almost always means someone else’s failure. For example, if I got into USC, that inherently means someone else didn’t. This can be even more awkward when you take into account how Americans value being humble and putting others before yourself. Oftentimes, Americans remedy discomfort with humor, which I believe is what makes this proverb transcendent. This proverb is not a joke, yet it masks as one because we choose to hide our self serving agendas under funny sayings. Referencing what my father said about curved tests, he never told me ‘wreck the curve so everyone else does worse than you,’ he just said ‘you don’t have to outrun the bear.’ Much like running from a bear, American humor is a self defense mechanism. 

Insider and Outsider

Nationality: Korean
Age: 24
Occupation: Barista
Residence: Seoul, Korea
Performance Date: 14 April 2020
Primary Language: Korean
Language: engish

Original Script: 인싸, 아싸

Phonetic (Roman) Script: Inssa and Ahssa

Full translation: Insider and Outsider

Main Piece:

The following is transcribed from a conversation between the interviewer and the informant, and it was translated from its original language Korean.

Informant: There’s this popular slang in Korea, especially for school and office settings, mostly college. It’s “Inssa” and “Ahssa”, they alway go in Paris. Inssa is shortened for insider, and ahssah is shortened for outsider. They describe the type of person you are in a given social setting. Insiders are those who can blend well with the crowd. They’re popular, outgoing, they’d get drinks all the time, talk to professors well, all that. Outsiders are, well, outsiders. They’re the people who don’t have any friends, who are not up to date with pop culture and all the new slangs.

Interviewer: Is this concept any different from the pre-established introvert and extrovert?

Informant: I think inssa and ahssa are more exclusively to these specific social settings, like schools, and more specifically colleges. I think it’s just a newer way of saying the same stuff, but it has slightly different tones. Introvert and extrovert are more like internal, personality trait things. I think you can be an introvert and an inssa, like you don’t have to be an extrovert to have good connections.

Interviewer: Are there any variations of these terms?

Informant: Yes. You can add the word ‘haek’ in front of them. Haek is Korean for nuclear, and Koreans use that word as kind of an additive to really emphasize things. So a ‘haek-inssa’ would be a really extreme insider, someone who knows everyone in their school. A haek-ahssa would be someone who’s like invisible.

Interviewer: How would you describe yourself when you were in college?

Informant: I think I was more of an inssa at first, but towards later years I jus stopped caring so much

Background:

My informant is a Korean male in his mid 20s, working as a barista in Seoul. He graduated from college already, but he describes himself as well versed with current Korean lingo and college culture.

Context:

The conversation took place on the phone. The informant was in house by himself in a comfforbtale setting.

My thoughts:

These new words came across as more jokey than serious, but they still gave me the sense that it was to point out people who weren’t outgoing. I’m not sure if categorizing everyone in these standards would be positive, but I did find the terminology very catchy.

Wonhyo and the Skull Water

Nationality: Korean
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Seoul, Korea
Performance Date: 3 April 2020
Primary Language: Korean
Language: English

Main Piece:

The following was transcribed from a conversation between the interviewer and the informant.

Informant: Korean culture is built on Confucianism and Buddhist teachings are very common. So a lot of proverbs, old sayings, and things like that nature are based on these concepts. A very famous story that’s even relevant today is Wonhyo. Wonhyo was an early Buddhist monk, a scholar, and a philosopher in Shinla dynasty, which is around like during the 600s. The story goes that he was on his way to China for essentially a study abroad. One night on his journey, he found a cave to take shelter in and decided to spend the night there. Inside the cave he found a bucket of water, and because he was thirsty he drank it all and it was delicious- tasted like water. Next morning, we woke up and realized that it was actually a human skull not a bucket, and the water was actually like some remnants from the brain basically. He learned from that incident that everything is up to your own beliefs, because like he believed the water to be good and his body in part made him to believe that, you know, so he decided not to pursue the study abroad and came back to Shinla (Korea).

Interviewer: Can you give me examples of how this story has become modernized? How do people nowadays use it?

Informant: It’s mostly like for comedic, or funny situations. Like for example, I saw this post on Twitter that basically this girl who works at Subway ran out of salt, so whenever a customer would ask for more salt she’d had to shake an empty salt shaker just to front. But apparently one customer complained that there was too much salt in their sandwich. In that situation, Koreans would describe it as the ‘skull salt shaker’, it’s like you add skull in front of the object in question, that makes the joke.

Interviewer: Why and how do you think a story that old stayed relevant even till this day?

Informant: I think with stories like these, the older the better, because they’re so distanced from any time specific things that it makes the story almost universal. And it’s just a relatable morale, everything depends on how you decided to look at it, that’s something that people can think about, no matter what year it is.

Background:

The informant is a student living in Seoul, Korea. She’s finished all her general education (from elementary to high school) in Korea, and now currently goes to a college in Seoul. She describes that the first time she read about the story of Wonhyo was through a history text book in 5th grade. Even though the informant isn’t a practicing Buddhist (she describes herself as atheist, like most Koreans), these beliefs and teachings are widely accepted and used disregard one’s religious beliefs.

Context:

The conversation took place over the phone, while the informant was alone in her college dorm, in a safe and comfortable environment.

My thoughts:

Upon doing some research, I learned that there are a few different versions of the story of Wonhyo. In the Japanese telling, Wonhyo went inside a cave only to learn next morning that it was actually a grave (so the water and skull is absent in this version). In another telling, it’s the combination of the two- he went inside a grave and drank the skull water. No matter which version of the story is the most faithful to what actually happened, the central morale of the tale remains the same.