On the screen
Caught on a screen very near me two weeks ago: a cute playing with
anaphoric pronouns in an old episode of
Taxi; an incredibly irritating
editing of Eddie Murphy's 1987
Raw
performance; and some great London street speech in the movie
Metrosexuality.
I rarely work in complete silence. I almost always have the
radio, the TV, a movie, or my iTunes playing in the background.
I've done this since I was a child. (Please don't write me
about my work habits.) But this stuff has to be a background
track, especially since when I'm deeply into the flow of writing or
thinking I entirely cease to attend to the background. Things
that actually
REQUIRE close attention just won't work:
movies in languages I can't follow (so I have to look at the
subtitles), for instance, or music that moves me strongly in one way or
another.
Trash television and trashy movies are especially good for my purposes,
and they have the virtue of providing me with occasional (but not too
frequent) examples of linguistic phenomena I collect.
Mutant-creature movies -- giant or newly vicious (or both) ants,
yellowjacket wasps, bees, snakes, fish, cats, whatever -- are
especially fine. Also mostly fine are things I've seen or heard
many times before; I can tune in occasionally when something memorable
comes along.
Monty Python
can run in the background, and every so often I'll take a break to
speak lines along with the Pythons.
ANAPHORA. Which brings
me to
Taxi, a classic
American sitcom I've
seen all the episodes of several times. Saturday two weeks ago,
spurning KFJC's
Norman Bates
Memorial Soundtrack Show (which is somewhat distracting because
Robert Emmett, the host, is a very heavy user of
Extris),
I went through the first third of
Taxi's
first season on DVD. Not perhaps the best choice in the world,
since I kept finding things to take note of. Including this wonderful
exchange, from "Bobby's Acting Career" (first shown on 10/5/78):
[Alex, the show's main character, comes into the Sunshine Cab garage
with a great dane]
Bobby: Where'd you find him?
Alex: I took him away from some guy in my cab; he was whipping him with
his leash.
Tony [to the dog]: Hey, you shouldn't do that, boy! You
could
hurt somebody.
Tony Banta, a cabdriver who's also a boxer and who's a bit on the slow
side, gets the (intended) antecedents reversed (this is endearing,
because he's looking at things from the point of view of the
dog). No sensible person would get the antecedents wrong.
(But simpler examples than this are trotted out, out of context, in
textbooks and advice manuals, as instances of "unclear antecedents" for
pronouns, in this case antecedents that are labeled unclear because
they're said to be ambiguous. I have a whole series of postings
in the works on "unclear antecedents", including one on "more than one
antecedent". Bottom line: the advice material totally fails to
take into account real-world plausibility and discourse organization,
and these factors are absolutely crucial, here and with regard to the
recently-discussed
modifier
attachment. There are some bad-news examples -- I have a
collection of them and occasionally post about them here -- but people
mostly don't have trouble locating antecedents.)
The problem for me as someone working while viewing was that I had to
stop and get this whole exchange down. Not conducive to work.
BLEEP. The next morning
I thought I'd catch Eddie Murphy's
1987 performance Raw (at Madison Square Garden) on
the Bravo Channel, I wasn't prepared for Bravo's massive bleeping
of all the taboo vocabulary. It was seriously disconcerting:
whole chunks of Murphy's shtick were reduced to function words with
blanks, and since the routines were fast-paced, you actually had to
listen carefully to them to guess at what had been elided.
Frustrating indeed. After a little while I abandoned this bizarre
event.
INNIT. And passed on to
a DVD of
Metrosexuality,
a film (originally, a
TV show) set in London's Notting Hill district, with a large cast of
characters, of several ethnicities, sexualities, and dialects.
It's very fast-paced, with lots of quick cuts. Not really an
Arnold Zwicky work thing, because it requires so much attention.
But it has some wonderful London street speech, including this
telephone exchange right at the beginning, between an adolescent and
his (flamingly) gay father, both black:
Dad: Just tell me what you want and be
done.
Son: How about a lift home, yeh? See, your no-good ragamuffin
ex-husband ain't shown up, innit, And I don't got
no bus fare,
innit.
Dad: But you do got legs, innit. And you do can walk, innit.
(Plot point: the son is trying to get his two dads, separated for 18
months, to reconcile, and is contriving to get them both in the same
place at the same time, on his behalf.)
There's just so much here: the deployment of
innit (which has several uses in
current London street speech, going well beyond its use as a fixed
question tag) and the
do's in
the dad's last two sentences, in particular.
Sadly, the interpretive burden was just too great for me, and I moved
to less challenging things, in the mutant-creature genre.
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at November 17, 2007 08:30 PM