European Rat Shit

Nationality: American
Age: 16
Occupation: student
Residence: Encino, CA
Performance Date: 3/30/17
Primary Language: English

Informant is sixteen years old.  He is a high school student and an athlete.  It is likely that this name for an otherwise fairly simple and low-stakes card game is an attempt by the young players to feel tough and cool, and to identify with a more sophisticated group by using language they perceive as being more adult.  The interviewer was unable to find any evidence of a game by this name, but the informant swears that most people his age know about it, or at least boys on sports teams, as he has played it with kids from other football teams, who recognized the name immediately.

Interviewer: Do you know any games, like something your friends taught you?

Informant: Well, there’s European Rat Shit.

Interviewer: What’s that?

Informant: It’s a card game, you play with, like, a normal deck, no jokers.  It’s similar to Slap Jack, which is where you each put a card down and you slap it when a Jack comes up and you get all the cards in the piles and the object is to get all the cards. But in European Rat Shit, each face card, ah, you, the other person—each face card you put down, the other person has to but down a certain amount of other cards and if there’s a sandwich, which would be one card, a different card, and the same card as the first card, then you slap it and you get the hand that’s down, or if there’s a double, same thing: same card on top of each other and you slap it the whole hand is yours.

Interviewer: Why’s it called that?

Informant: That’s a good question. Can I google it? There’s a lot of names for it that I know. European War, um, hold on. ERS, which is just, like, abbreviation, I guess. Three. I know three names. Counting European Rat Shit.

Initiation Ritual in Bakeries

Nationality: American
Age: 77
Occupation: retired
Residence: los angeles
Performance Date: 4/22/17
Primary Language: English

Informant worked in the bakery belonging to his grandmother and father to put himself through college.  While there, he encountered this initiation rite that every new employee had to ‘pass’ before they were officially one of the guys.  It is a variation on the idea of snipe-hunting, or the naval ‘steaming the deck’ trope.

Informant: We used to give the new guy a ten gallon cream can and send him three blocks down, a new guy when he came, started, and send him three blocks down to another bakery to get a can of steam.

Interviewer: Why?

Informant: Just kind of initiation.The milkcan, the cream can, the thing weighed like forty fifty pounds, they had to be heavy or they’d get dented.

Interviewer: Empty?  Thirty pounds empty?

Empty. Ten gallon can? It’s huge, it’s made of metal, I used to carry em around full.  By the time the guy figured out it was a, I guess, a hazing thing, he was one of the family, you know.

Jokes spotlighting concerns about masculinity

Nationality: American
Age: 77
Occupation: retired (former dentist and underwater photographer)
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/1/17
Primary Language: English

Informant is a 77 year old male, American, grew up working in his father’s bakery in Boyle Heights.

His father, who came of age just before WW2, shared a wealth of proverbs and dites with Informant, mostly disparaging toward women or somehow engaged with how to be a manly, which might have been of great concern during a time when women were flooding workplaces while men were fighting overseas.

Informant: If I missed an opportunity or something, he’d say to me, “Alan, if you fell into a barrel of titties, you’d come out sucking your thumb.”  I know he got that from his boxing buddies but it’s a little late to ask for details.

His favorite joke was, “You know why cavemen dragged their women around by the hair, right?  It’s because if you drag em by the feet, they fill up with dirt.

There’s more, but I can’t tell you, it’s too–it’s too much.

How to talk about dogs on the internet

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: student
Residence: los angeles
Performance Date: 4/26/17
Primary Language: English

So on the internet, mostly on Facebook groups and some subreddits, there’s this sort of new vernacular that’s developed around sharing pictures and memes of dogs. Instead of puppies and dogs, they’re called puppers and doggos, and different breeds sometimes have their own nicknames. The shiba inu sometimes gets called a shibe, and there’s a fluffy white dog breed, a Samoyed I think, that gets called a cloudo, because it looks kinda like a cloud. Anyway, beyond that, there are these tropes and speaking patterns that people use to caption and comment on these memes. People will say, “good boy does a v heckin good trick!” But they’ll capitalize “good boy,” put a space between each letter and slap an E on the end. This usually has lots of variations, like cloud boy, smart boy, or whatever is relevant to what’s happening in the image or gif. And instead of saying “very” they just use the letter v. It’s kind of weird looking from the outside, but at the same time these communities are very wholesome, and the whole vernacular is a fun in-joke on the internet.

Chicken Soup

Nationality: Jewish American
Age: 102
Occupation: retired
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 2/28/17
Primary Language: English

Informant was asked if she knew any good cold remedies.

Informant: So if you’re not feeling well, you should have a lot of fluids and mostly chicken soup, if you can.  Water and what have you is for the birds.  And sweet stuff won’t help unless it’s orange juice.  Fresh squeezed.  But soup, soup is what you really should be having.

Interviewer: So just a can of soup is okay?  Like Campbells?  Do you add anything to it?

Informant.: You know better than that.  You don’t open a can of it.

You need the vegetables, you need them to cook together.  Just opening something doesn’t give you anything.  It’s the making of it that makes it do for you.

Interviewer: Okay, so–

Informant: So you know, you start with a pot of water and what they used to call soup herbs.  Soup herbs, you’d get at the green grocer tied up together in a bundle and it was a little parsley, a little dill maybe, a parsnip, a carrot, some celery with the leaves, and you put that in your water with enough salt to make the water taste like something.

And then if you have it and you have the, you know, you feel you can do it, you put in a whole chicken and you just put it on the low fire.  And you let it go.  You don’t want to boil it all the way up, you want just small bubbles, you want to keep it clear and it keeps the meat from being tough, if you don’t, you know, if you let it boil and what have you.

So you don’t have a chicken, so you use maybe bones leftover from your roast chicken or I don’t know you can still, if you can, if you can get them, but chicken feet make a very rich-tasting soup, and depending on the butcher, maybe you don’t pay for them at all.

But you put these all together and you cook it for a couple of hours and you put maybe a little pepper or lemon juice in it if you want something more to it, rice or kasha [buckwheat groats] if you want it substantial, and then you throw away your soup herbs and you shred any meat you want to have with the soup, or you save it and you make chicken salad, but you can put more vegetables and heat them through and let them get soft before you eat it.

And don’t skim off the fat, that’s the best part.