Category Archives: Folk speech

No ivory is there in a dog’s mouth

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 47
Occupation: Artist
Residence: Beijing, China
Performance Date: March 26 2017
Primary Language: Chinese

Title:

My informant LWQ is a 47 years old Chinese artist. She was born and lived in southern part of China, especially Nanjing for many years before she moved to the north, Beijing at age 36.

The conversation is in Chinese.

 

Main piece:

Original script: “狗嘴里吐不出象牙。”

Phonic script: “gǒu zuǐlǐ tǔ bù chū xiàng yá.”

Transliteration: “No ivory is there in a dog’s mouth.”

Full translation: “A filthy mouth cannot utter decent language.”

Analysis on the script: Dog is a representation of badness, or vulgarity, while ivory symbolizes objects that are valuable and precious. This idiom is used to describe a person’s speech in sarcasm, that the words from this person are all truthless hogwash.

 

Context of the performance:

My informant LWQ was joking about a conversation between her and her husband. In a jocular manner, she described her husband’s words using this idiom, to express a disagree attitude in her husband’s words.

 

My thoughts about the piece:

It is very interesting that there are so many idioms, proverbs in Chinese about dogs, and without any exception, dogs carries negative meanings in all those folk pieces. In general, dogs represent inferiority, humbleness, degradation, and manifests people who are inferior in morality and status. However, at the same time, though folk pieces about dogs are all negative, they are used in a jocular manner, always being performed in joking, or playful satire. Moreover, I remember by grandmother always call me “狗东西” (phonic script: “gǒu dōng xī”, transliteration: “Dog thing”, translation: “doggie”) where dog is used in a term of endearment. It seems that there’s an ambiguous attitude toward dog among Chinese people.

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.

Jewish Day Camp Traditions and Songs

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

The informant is from New York City and told me of his summer camp experience.

“Okay so I went to a Jewish Day Camp, so like you’d go, everyday you’d go to a bunch of different bus stops and then you go to the campground and do whatever camp shit you’d do and then come back like, so it was a Jewish camp and we celebrated Shabbat, and we even like one of the activities would be like, so every friday you’d celebrate Shabbat and then alongside the other activities like archery, ceramics, we would sing Jewish songs, so there’s like um, oh man, oh there’s “who knows one” and it’s like, i think it goes up to twelve and there’s like different hebrew or like old testament things like, or like, definitely like “nine” is the months of a -, I don’t remember but it’s like “Who knows one?” “I know one!” “one is the da-da-da-da-da-duh” “who knows two? I know two! Two is the da-da-da-da-da-duh.” And I know like one of them is like, twelve is the tribes of Israel, um, I think nine for whatever reason is the months a woman is pregnant? Um, uh, and just like seven is like the days of the week that god made, and all these other Jewish songs of like um, wait ok, so there’s who knows one, and there’s like, uh, I don’t remember anymore. But like the main part about the songs that’s pretty funny is that like seventy-five, no maybe like two-thirds of the camp were like black and hispanic, and were like not Jewish, because it was like, a somewhat cheap day camp in, like Manhattan, and they had a lot of bus stops in like Harlem, so like we made these black and hispanic kids eat Challah and drink grape juice and like sing these Jewish songs, and they were like kinda into it, none of them were like, “why are we doing this?” all of them were like “okay””

Analysis:

What is most interesting is that the songs were of religious connotation, but that many of those who attended the camp were not of that religion (Jewish). So they were learning all these songs and stories that did not directly affect them at all, opening up Jewish ceremonies to the wider world. It is also interesting to see how these “children’s songs” deal with adult themes such as pregnancy, which as a child did not really comprehend until much later.

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.

Creamies

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 3/20
Primary Language: English

This was told to a group of friends during a debate of what soft-served Ice Cream is called across the US. The informant is from Vermont, on the East Coast. There was a divide between East and West coasters over what to call soft-serve ice cream, but the informant was able to give me some background on her reasoning.

“So creamies are what we call soft serve ice cream, and I truly did not know they were called something else until i was eight years old. And like it truly makes sense that that would be what they were called, and um, it makes sense because they’re like ubiquitous, um, there was a creamies, and like, I counted recently, and I worked at an ice cream store over the summer that didn’t sell creamies, and like people came in and asked everyday and asked “do you have creamies” and we’d be like no, but I could stop at four or five places between my house and where I worked over the summer and get a creamie. And I worked maybe two miles from where I lived. Um, and it’s kinda like this thing because, and I kinda realised this recently, because the main industry in Vermont besides tourism is dairy, that it’s, like, i know more than most people about dairy products and that I’ve had them in hoards all my life and it was very encouraged to eat fine dairy. We ate a lot of really good cheese, really good ice cream and really good butter. Um, and so, I guess creams is just slang for a soft serve.”