- So you’re in a room with no exit. There’s only a round table and a saw. How do you get out? You cut the table in half, because two halves make a “whole”.
- This was a riddle the informant had heard in class one day, at her middle school. She likes to re-tell this riddle because most of the time, she discovered that people are unable to answer it. She likes that they are surprised when they learn what the answer actually is, because it then appears to be rather obvious. She actually learned it from her substitute teacher during their class time. Their teacher was trying to see if anyone in their class could solve this riddle before being released for recess. The informant thinks the riddle is light-hearted enough to tell to others just for fun, or in casual conversation.
- This riddle can be shared in normal day-to-day conversation if you wish to incorporate something more entertaining within your conversation. This riddle is good for all ages, from elementary school students to adults.
- I thought that this riddle was effective. I actually was not able to solve it, but I found it humorous when the informant eventually told me the answer. I think that I would share this riddle with some of my other friends sometime, just for fun. I would also like to know whether or not they would immediately be able to solve the riddle. I have never heard this riddle before, so it’d be interesting to see if this were a well-known riddle among my peers that I just never had learned prior to speaking with the informant.
Category Archives: Folk speech
Proverbs
D is a 57 year old man. He is a practicing cardiologist at a hospital in the northern suburbs of Illinois. He identifies as American as he grew up in Boston, but he strongly associates with his Scottish heritage as well. D completed his undergraduate studies at Dartmouth University and he attended Cornell University for his degree in medicine. During his studies, both undergraduate and med school, D studied abroad in France two times. While in medical school, D studied at the Faculté de Médecine et de Maïeutique de Lille in Lille, France. English is his primary language, yet he is also fluent in French.
D: Funny thing, it’s hard to remember proverbs out of the blue. They’re so associated with experiences that I usually only think of them in context. On the other hand, I use them all the time to explain things to patients because they get complex ideas across in a familiar and easy way.
Me: What proverbs do you use often?
D: Well, I just used “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” today when talking with a colleague of mine about treating his wife’s normal blood pressure. She gets distressed in some doctor’s offices & her blood pressure rises. In the end we both agreed that “things are normal & should not be messed with.”
Me: Any other proverbs you use?
D: Another classic I use all the time with patients is “if you don’t use it, you lose it” as a universally-recognized motivation to “get off your butt.” I’ve tried it with my dad too, but with no success. My mom and I even mapped out their condo on a piece of paper with distances marked and put it on the fridge in hopes of encouraging him to get out and walk.
D: There’s also: “the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.” This is a recent one which is a favorite of mine, by a pastor in New York named Ralph Sockman, who preached in the 1930s-1960s. My corollary has been “the more the islands of knowledge, the greater the archipelago of understanding.”
Me: What do you mean by that?
D: What I am trying to say is the more stuff you know, the more stuff you understand. I say this to my son a lot. It’s using the things you learn in life like putting the pieces of a puzzle together in order to understand other stuff.
D, while having a bit of trouble at the beginning trying to remember a proverb, ended up talking about three proverbs that he really likes and uses a lot. He uses proverbs in his everyday life, especially with his patients at work, to get across a point that might otherwise be confusing, or maybe even boring. By using proverbs and saying things in a different way, it is more likely to reach someone than by saying the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different reaction every time. So while proverbs didn’t seem to be a prominent part of D’s everyday speech, they are something he uses very frequently.
“Faith over fear.”
Informant: At my gym, we always say, “Faith over fear.” And that was like something we used to say all the time, and that was the one point that I was even semi religious in my life.
My informant is a freshman at the University of Southern California. She is from San Diego, California. We had this conversation in the study room of my sorority house.
This is interesting because it somewhat can be related to a ritual before going out to perform. My informant was a cheerleader for a while, so this would work as a ritual and a superstition for some kind of performance she would ever do. It seems that many people have religious rituals they do before a performance, such as one of my informants doing the Catholic cross before going on in every ballet number she did. These manifest even in people who aren’t religious, and my informant is not religious anymore. This is interesting and shows some type of dependency on the idea of some hope for help from some other place, even without the belief that a God or higher power exists. It seems to be a type of mechanism that people just develop.
Chin Music – Baseball Jargon
Informant: Matthew Henry McGeagh is my 19 year-old twin brother. He was born and raised in Pacific Palisades, California. His family history comes from Irish, Catholic, Jewish, German, and Swedish roots; with an emphasis on the Irish culture. He attended Catholic school from kindergarten until 12th grade and was raised Catholic by his family as well. He played many sports growing up and is very athletic. He now plays baseball at the University of Pennsylvania.
Matt said, “Man that pitcher was really hitting me with the chin music that at bat.”
My brother said that this baseball lingo refers to a pitch that comes at the hitter, “high and inside.” That means that the ball that was pitched came very close to the batter’s head region but did not hit him. Pitcher’s do not appreciate it when a batter stands close to the plate because it makes it harder for them to throw an accurate pitch (a strike). Therefore, if a batter stands close to the plate, the pitcher may purposely throw the ball close to the batter’s head in order to get him to stand further away. Also, it is harder to hit a ball as a batter if you are further away from the plate, so throwing the ball at the batter’s head would certainly scare him and cause him to step back. The term “chin music” comes from the fact that the ball is pretty close to clocking the batter in the chin. Also, when a ball is pitched you can often hear the speed of it hissing by. The closer the ball is to your ears, the louder you’re going to hear it, hence the “music” part of the phrase.
This phrase is used extremely often and used as an explanation of a pitch, a complaint to an umpire, or a general observation. Players, announcers, and dedicated fans all use this term. It is a term that a baseball player hears often and uses often, whenever the occurrence happens. It is honestly a sort of euphemism for a wild pitch that is looked at as unfair or intentional. I love this sort of jargon, it allows for a common language amongst the culture of the sport.
Names
Collector: Oh! Do the story about why that guy got mad at you, or got mad at someone…
Informant: So, I don’t know if you’ve heard this story Maddie, um when I was in Spain, uh, so the word, like the colloquial term for blowjob is a person’s name in every city in Spain, and so, um, like in my friend’s town Toledo, Maria, and then in Granada it’s Victoria, um, so that’s just the context. So, I’m out with my friends—I was friends with this Spanish guy named Mario—and in Spain you go on dates, it’s like middle school style dating, so group dates. And so, um, Mario would ask me out and said invite some of your friends, so me and my two American friends were meeting up with his two friends, but then last minute his really good friend from where he’s from, Cordova, came to visit down in Granada, and so we were like—he was like “one more person” and I was like “oh my other friends are busy,” and he was like, “it’s fine, like [whatever his name is] will just come hang out”—I think his name was David. And so, we’re all at this bar hanging out, and then, um, we were doing like a pub crawl, and so we were supposed to head down to the next place, and so, um, his other friend, Luis, was like “oh guys we’re going to this next bar in 5 minutes, like finish your drinks,” and so like all the Spanish people are lightly sipping, and the Americans start to, like, you know, really try and down their drinks, and my friends, Claire and Diana, had like straws in their drinks and so they were trying to, kind of like, furiously sip.
Person: You have another friend named Diana?
Informant: Mhm
Person: Rude. Rude!
Informant: She looks nothing like you, so it’s okay.
Person: Sorry, continue.
Informant: She’s Italian and from upstate New York. Um, and so, we—but I had a beer, and so I needed to like, chug it, so I just, you know, like, I’m an adult and a frat star, I chug my beer. And I look, everyone’s kind of staring at me, because in Europe you don’t have to, like, chug your drinks because you’re an adult, um and you can drink it slow and be a normal person. Um, and so I’m like, whatever, I did it, it’s done, don’t make fun of me. And, um, I look up, and David is like smirking, and he says, “Aye que buenas Mayas,” and in Granada, at least in Spain, mallas, I’ve always been taught that means leggings, so it’s M-A-L-L-A-S, leggings, like, you know, like, the pants, so, um, I was like “what?” because I was wearing jeans, so I was like, maybe he thinks these are like, jeggings, okay whatever. And, like, I look over at Mario, and Mario looks furious. And I’m like, okay. And he said something really fast to David in Cordovan slang, and—Cordovian—and like, I don’t know what it means, and I, but I can tell he’s really pissed, but I’m like, I don’t know why you’re angry, okay. And so we start walking to the next bar, and I’m like holding hands with Mario, and I’m like, “Why were you so upset?” And he was like, “Oh, I don’t want to talk about it.” And I’m like, “No, I don’t understand, I didn’t really get the joke, so like what did that mean?” Because like Mario speaks English and Spanish, and so in Spanish I’m asking this, but like, “Can you explain it in English because I don’t get it.” And he was like, in English, “No we’re not going to talk about it.” And I was, he never speaks to me in English unless I ask him to, so I was like, “No, just, just, tell me.” And he like, will not say it, and I’m like, I’m the worst, when I want to know something, I will, I will force you to tell me, and so eventually he’s like, “He was saying, you know like how here Victoria means, like, blowjob?” I was like, “yeah.” He was like, “Well, in like, our town, outside of Cordova, like, Mayas are like blowjobs.” And I was like, “Wait what?” And he was like “Cause, you know, you chugged your drink, so you have to like open your throat, just kind of pour it…” And I was like, “Oh, Bueno, Bueno, [what sounds like “tamos”] a qui…” I switched right back to Spanish, because I was like I don’t want to talk about this hmmmm. So, that’s the end of that story.
Informant is a junior at the University of Southern California. She is studying communications here. She is from Boston, Massachusetts. She spent a while in the southern part of Spain, and speaks fluent Spanish. I spoke to her while we were eating lunch at my sorority house one day. We were sitting together with some of my other informants. Much of what she told me was learned from her own experiences.
I had recalled her telling this story, and thought that it was interesting and a new part of a culture I wasn’t very familiar with. As we were sitting at lunch discussing folklore, I remembered that she had told me this before, and asked her to tell it again. I haven’t heard of any other culture that does this to so much of an extent. It seems that every place, or so it’s suggested, uses some woman’s name for blowjob. It’s also interesting to see the difference in cultures having to do with the consumption of alcohol. It seems that a stereotype perpetuated by the party culture of many large and small universities is so different than the way the majority of the world consumes alcohol.