Faster Than Kudzu

The Slang Squad

We are talking to realtors about various marketing plans to get our baby house sold so we can head for the dream house. One team that came over to pitch us was comprised of a sellers agent (a big-boned hardy white man with a great big booming southern accent---he might as well have been named Joe-Bob as he marched through our baby house in his crap-kickers *cough* my 13 year old nephew reads this blog *cough*) and a buyer’s agent (a very sylphlike and sophisticated black woman, no southern accent to speak of, wearing 300 dollar shoes.)

Now before this story makes any sense, you have to be in the know about Homestar Runner. My nephew Daniel turned me onto that site, and I have to say, a week without a a new Strong Bad email is a sad sad week indeed.

Strong Bad e-mail is one of those things like Monty Python. If you get it, you get it. If you do not, you probably cannot be taught. It isn’t an acquired taste, I’m saying. It either lines up perfectly with the giggle center in your brain OR you are one of those people who don’t pop a blood vessel laughing when your friend Julie’s dog lets out an enormous fart that shakes her house to the foundations and then looks at his own butt in surprised reproach, as if to say, “What were you thinking, butt?”

The PINNACLE of Strong Badness is a series of animated movies that this animated character is supposed to have made himself called TEEN GIRL SQUAD. I think there are five of them now? But the one with the possum is best. At any rate, these three presumably white, presumably suburban, probably 13 year old girls bounce around macking on boys and getting killed by arrows and MSG all the while frontin’ like playas as they awkwardly fling around black urban hipster slang, e.g. frontin’ like playas. It’s hilarious. IT JUST IS. Especially since Strong Bad himself does all the voices of all the girls on the squad. So it’s SOME GUY pretending to be Strong Bad pretending to be four seperate 13 year old white suburban girls who are ALL pretending to have street cred. COME ON. THAT’S HILARIOUS.

ANYWAY, without STRONG BAD and TGS, what are the chances that “DAG YO” would have made it into my 30-something small town southern mommy vocabulary-of-slang? VERY SLIM. And yet, there it is in the middle of my lexicon, sandwiched in between “ill as hornets” and “off the chain.” But it IS slang. That means I have never called up my editor and said, “Dag yo, why is the art department ill as hornets? They are off the chain with this cover idea.” That’s not the language I speak with her. With her, I speak Comfortable Business American. I subdue my Georgia twang and talk faster than I normally would, for example.

BAH I have nattered on too long about SB e-mail and SLANG and am out of time – I will tell you what happened with the realtors tomorrow. Dag Yo. Peace out.

Posted by joshilyn at June 23, 2004 12:34 PM