Category Archives: Folk speech

Dongle

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: April 6, 2018
Primary Language: English

The folk term “dongle” requires a bit of history. When the iPhone 7 came out, Apple announced that they had removed the headphone jack from the bottom of the phone. To work around this, they sold adapters that would allow people to plug headphones into their new iPhones. The folkspeech that refers to these adapters was described to me by a friend outside of a party.

“A dongle now is, is referring to the dongle that allows you to listen to music with your regular, like, three, like your regular eighth inch adapter, your aux adapter into your iPhone, which doesn’t have that port anymore. And if it were called adapter, people would just, it would, it would sort of be a normal thing. But because it’s like, ‘Aw, man, I don’t have the dongle with me,’ or something, like, ‘I can’t listen to music now.’ It’s just like, I think it really is a derogatory – or at least it has a bad connotation to it.”

“The word ‘dongle’ to me has always been adapter. I don’t know when it started. Uh, I’d say that the connotation of dongle, as opposed to adapter, is negative, right? Like a dongle is sort of like something that is like unwieldy, that you don’t wanna be carrying around.”

It Makes Sense If You Don’t Think About It

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: April 12, 2018
Primary Language: English

“It makes sense if you don’t think about it.”

This folk phrase was said by a friend during class. This example is somewhat different from the others because the performer did not know it was folklore. He noted:

“I legitimately thought I made it up.”

“I mean, like, it’s probably from somewhere else, but just like subliminally messaged.”

Here is another example of this phrase, used ast the title of an article: http://www.rweconomics.com/It_makes_Sense_If_You_Don’t_Think_About_It.htm

It is somewhat of a parody of a different common phrase: it makes sense if you think about it. This variation refers to things that only make sense in general terms, and stop making sense under scrutiny.

Fryft

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Musician
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: April 25, 2018
Primary Language: English

This folk term refers to the “free Lyft” given by USC at certain hours. Lyft is a popular ride-sharing app, and USC partnered with them to give free rides to students to help prevent drunk driving. My friend and bandmate mentioned the term at a rehearsal. I asked her when she had first heard this word. ‘A’ refers to my friend, and ‘B’ refers to me.

A: Um, I started hearing it my first, like, week here at USC. As a young fresh. Um…

B: And it’s just USC campus that you…

A: Yeah. I’ve used it other places, and no one knows what I’m talking about. Or I’ll talk, like, “Oh yeah, I was at this party and then I Fryfted home.” And they’re all like, “What the hell…is a Fryft?”

This implies that the term is only used locally, by people who use USC’s free Lyft. Here is an article that uses this USC-centric slang: https://spoonuniversity.com/place/how-to-take-advantage-of-fryft-at-usc

 

City Kid Morals

Nationality: African American
Age: 23
Occupation: Marketing, Artist
Residence: Oakland, CA
Performance Date: April 18, 2018
Primary Language: English

The interviewer’s initials are denoted through the initials BD, while the informant’s responses are marked as WC.

WC: This is just—a, a little banter between different moral codes that exist within my own consciousness because I come from an environment in which the law of the land may be one thing, but how I feel on the inside is an entirely different set of morals. To survive this environment, you do have to adopt the law of the land. The saying goes “the boys outside are takin’ lives, but can’t run and hide. Say if you’re scared, go to church, but they’ll put me in the dirt if I testify.” Which basically just means that things happen that may be a little scary but you’re living in an environment that if you try to tell on somebody because something scares you, the scariest thing possible can probably happen to you. That level of paranoia kinda, maybe sometimes will guide people away from their nature. You know? Because there’s usually problems that we want to solve, but people run from problems because they don’t want more problems.

BD: Did you come up with this?

WC: No, the words I came up with, but the idea is something that has existed generations before I was even a twinkle in my parents’ eyes.

 

This is the second piece of folklore I collected from this particular informant, and it is interesting how his folk beliefs seem to center around karma and attitudes towards what will happen in the future and what is under one’s own control. This particular belief is one that stems from his life growing up in Oakland, where he witnessed a lot of violence and crime. He did not want to share specifics or allow me to record, but he did relate that it was rough growing up in the inner city, and as a result he coined this saying, which embodies a few of the ideas and “rules” of growing up in such a place.

 

“Fricky, Dicky, Dutch!”

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 26, 2018
Primary Language: English

The interviewer’s initials are denoted through the initials BD, while the informant’s responses are marked as NC.

NC: My father used to say “fricky, dicky, dutch!” whenever he got frustrated with something, but I have no idea why. I thought it was like a normal thing for people to say when they were frustrated. But then I was talking to my brother, and he told me he said that one time and everyone looked at him really weirdly, and that’s how he learned. So he gave me advice so I wouldn’t make the same mistake.

BD: Did your dad get this from anywhere in particular?

NC: I have no idea. My dad’s spanish, so English is his second language, so he definitely didn’t get it from his family. I have no idea. I feel like it’s something—when he says it, it’s like “freeky deeky duck!” because he has a Spanish accent—I guess it’s something that sort of rhymes, when you say it, it rolls off the tongue.

BD: No one else in your family says it?

NC: No.

Analysis: I hypothesize this bit of folk speech arose out of a need to not use profanity. It is interesting how it would have passed down to generations after the informant’s father, if not for the normalization by society—an unusual saying is stifled by those who are not familiar with it. The three words in the phrase seem to have no interconnectedness, save for the similar endings of the first two, and similar beginnings of the last two. Perhaps it only arose for the way it rolls off of the tongue.