The Innovative Usage Thread

[faiuwle]

I mainly saw it on tumblr, but I guess there's a reddit or two devoted to it, too. There's also a Wikipedia article about it, and some US congressmen tried their hands at it as well.

[sunandshadow]

Here is the Know Your Meme page for Doge. Yes it's kind of like lolspeak, and l33+$p34k before that. Slanguage
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/doge

[gmalivuk]

But would you accept "you can definitely see you" as grammatical, Nessari?

I'm sure people would say that phrase around here, though not as a complete sentence. "You can see you have been defeated." is definitely grammatical to me. "You can see you are about to run out of time." "You can see you will win shortly." On the other hand "you can see yourself" or "you can see for yourself" can't have the "yourself" replaced with "you".

It seems like most of the innovative usages I encounter I read on the internet before I hear them in real life. "That is happy-making!" "If you make a video game with anthro characters of course people will want to cyber in it, because furries." And Doge-speak, which is melodramatic faux Engrish that almost always includes "Wow!", number disagreement, referring to oneself in the third person, and using adverbs where adjectives would be expected and adjectives where adverbs would be expected: "Many question! Such confuze! Wow! Doge has no idea what do! Very headache! You is help? Doge begging!"

Verbs are more the purview of lolcats, no?

[sunandshadow]

Verbs are more the purview of lolcats, no?

I think lolcats are supposed to make the type of mistakes that uneducated native speakers make (spelling, mondegreens), while doge is supposed to make the type of mistakes that people who are learning English (or whatever language the lol is in) as a second language make (agreement of various kinds, odd rhythm due to only using short sentences, and different cultural idea of what sounds ridiculous vs. what sounds serious, especially as regards enthusiasm and sales/advertisements).

[gmalivuk]

I don't think that analysis is correct at all. I have never seen a native speaker make most of the lolcat mistakes unless doing so intentionally, and I've never seen my ESL students produce fragments quite like the doge. There is actually some deeper analysis of this very comparison.

In any case, the sentence, "You is help?" in particular seems much more like "I can has cheezeburger?" than like "such innovative. very fragment. wow."

[sunandshadow]

I don't think that analysis is correct at all. I have never seen a native speaker make most of the lolcat mistakes unless doing so intentionally, and I've never seen my ESL students produce fragments quite like the doge. There is actually some deeper analysis of this very comparison.

In any case, the sentence, "You is help?" in particular seems much more like "I can has cheezeburger?" than like "such innovative. very fragment. wow."

In terms of errors, I think the humor of both lolcats and doge lols comes from exaggerating mistakes beyond those which are realistically encountered. I do think Doge's popularity comes partly from the fact that he fills the gap that was left when Engrish Funny was killed off for not being profitable enough. The description in that article of doge lols as having a more stream-of-conscious, picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words, does seem accurate and is very interesting to me. The characterization of Doge as being stoned also seems accurate, though a hyper and twitchy personality is also commonly assigned to him, depending on the situation in the lol). But, there's nothing preventing the creation of cat lols with a scattered-though-fragment style, it could easily be back-ported. There have already been lols with cats showing these two personality types. The communities of people who create these two types of jokes have almost 100% crossover; it would be strange if the two stayed separate instead of blending. I already saw a dolan comic with doge as a character.

The article's statement that dogs don't exist in lolcat land is simply not true. Dogfort is a recurring setting/military organization in lolcat comics where dogs play a military role opposing cats. Dogs and cats are often portrayed as carrying out Spy-vs-Spy adventures where they infiltrate each others' organizations in disguise. And dogs are often cast in the role of an adoptive parent or sibling, or a half-sibling or child of cuckoldry. Or dogs and cats are portrayed as children of the same human family trying to blame a household disaster on each other. There are also lols which have only dogs and bear no relation to cats at all.

Overall, I think that doge speak is a stylistic innovation comparable to writing fiction in the second person or a stream-of-consciousness style, but doge style can be included within lol-speak, which is a form innovation comparable to the comic page or strip.

[Ser]

"fapstinence"

[gmalivuk]

I don't think that analysis is correct at all. I have never seen a native speaker make most of the lolcat mistakes unless doing so intentionally, and I've never seen my ESL students produce fragments quite like the doge. There is actually some deeper analysis of this very comparison.

In any case, the sentence, "You is help?" in particular seems much more like "I can has cheezeburger?" than like "such innovative. very fragment. wow."

In terms of errors, I think the humor of both lolcats and doge lols comes from exaggerating mistakes beyond those which are realistically encountered. I do think Doge's popularity comes partly from the fact that he fills the gap that was left when Engrish Funny was killed off for not being profitable enough. The description in that article of doge lols as having a more stream-of-conscious, picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words, does seem accurate and is very interesting to me. The characterization of Doge as being stoned also seems accurate, though a hyper and twitchy personality is also commonly assigned to him, depending on the situation in the lol). But, there's nothing preventing the creation of cat lols with a scattered-though-fragment style, it could easily be back-ported. There have already been lols with cats showing these two personality types. The communities of people who create these two types of jokes have almost 100% crossover; it would be strange if the two stayed separate instead of blending. I already saw a dolan comic with doge as a character.

The article's statement that dogs don't exist in lolcat land is simply not true. Dogfort is a recurring setting/military organization in lolcat comics where dogs play a military role opposing cats. Dogs and cats are often portrayed as carrying out Spy-vs-Spy adventures where they infiltrate each others' organizations in disguise. And dogs are often cast in the role of an adoptive parent or sibling, or a half-sibling or child of cuckoldry. Or dogs and cats are portrayed as children of the same human family trying to blame a household disaster on each other. There are also lols which have only dogs and bear no relation to cats at all.

Overall, I think that doge speak is a stylistic innovation comparable to writing fiction in the second person or a stream-of-consciousness style, but doge style can be included within lol-speak, which is a form innovation comparable to the comic page or strip.

Sure, the author overstated certain things, such as the nonexistence of lolspeaking dogs prior to the doge meme and the stark distinction between the two. But I linked there for the (links to) linguistic discussions, not to the historical evolution of cat- and dog-based photo memes.

And of course there's huge overlap between the people who make (or made) LOLcat images and those who make doge images. And I think the fact that those people themselves use and perceive a distinction is relevant and supports my point. They don't tend to caption cats with the LOLcat font and things like "wow. so meme", and they don't tend to caption pictures of shiba inu dogs with "I can has" in Comic Sans.. In my experience, there were few non-sentence exclamation captions in pre-doge LOLcat images, and there wasn't all that much verbery in the initial development of the original doge meme. And the existence of such a perceptible distinction is why this image makes sense:

[Salmoneus]

Chris Christie:
“I am a very sad person. I’m sad. I’m sad. That’s the predominant emotion I feel right now is sadness, sadness that I was betrayed by a member of my staff, sadness that I had people who I entrusted with important jobs who acted completely inappropriately, sad that that’s led the people of New Jersey to have less confidence in the people that I’ve selected. The emotion that I’ve been displaying in private is sad. I don’t know what the stages of grief are in exact order, but I know anger gets there at some point. I’m sure I’ll have that too. But the fact is right now I’m sad... I am a very sad person today. That’s the emotion I feel. A person close to me betrayed me, a person who I counted on and trusted for five years betrayed me. A person who I gave a high government office to betrayed me. I probably will get angry at some point, but I got to tell you the truth. I’m sad. I’m a sad guy standing here today, and very disappointed. And that’s the overriding emotion. Someone asked me that before. That’s the overriding emotion. It’s a sad day for me. And I’m doing what I’m obligated to do under this job, because it’s the right thing to do, and I’m doing it. But it doesn’t make me angry at the moment. It just makes me sad.”

I think my favourite is 'the emotion that I've been displaying in private is sad'. That's got to be the most robot-alien description of feeling something that I've ever...

[If we're including temporal abnormalities as innovations, Christie's also reconfigured the nature of the day/night cycle - he learnt about the e-mails yesterday, and then spent two sleepless nights worrying about them in the 24 hours between finding out and firing the person responsible.]

[gmalivuk]

What's innovative about, "I'm a sad guy standing here today"?

[jmcd]

"Now go read two non-political large articles on Wikipedia." - Nessari

Isn't that normally with 'large' preceding 'non-political'?

[Drydic]

Yeah. I wrote that in a couple posts, the adjectives might've gotten moved around while editing before posting.

[----]

"Now go read two non-political large articles on Wikipedia." - Nessari

Isn't that normally with 'large' preceding 'non-political'?

Normally, yeah, but I think that usage is okay. It gives a certain focus on the non-politicalness of the articles.

[gmalivuk]

It addition, to me it suggests that "large articles" are perceived as a unified class of things, the way we can talk about "big cats" or "little people" while keeping the size adjective directly before the noun instead of separating them with the usual sorts of adjectives that come between size and the head noun.

[sunandshadow]

"I'll give you a dollar. No wait, hold on, I'll give you a five dollars." This specifically meant "a five dollar bill", and could not be used to mean "a stack of five $1 bills".

[linguoboy]

Yesterday heard do + preposition used intransitively in a novel way. (Context: University administrator talking about getting students the help they need.)

"We try not to do for students. Sometimes we do with."

[Ser]

I heard "pickle kisser" in an actual conversation. The word is not bolded in the list on the left side, so it's not a commonly searched word, though five people have already provided a definition.

[ol bofosh]

This is new to me, but I don't know if it's new to you. I just heard "who'sever here" instead of "whoever's here".

Edit: probably a shortening of whosoever's, shortened to whosever and without the 's.

[Cedh]

Something from German here. Context: My sister's two-year-old son didn't want to eat his supper sandwich, running away several times to play, and then complaining he was hungry. Her reaction:

"Dann komm zu uns an den Tisch, dann kannst du dein schon zweimal versucht zu essendes Brot essen!"

(~ "Then come to the table with us, then you can eat your tried-to-eat-twice-already sandwich!", with an extended participle phrase equivalent to a whole subclause. A gloss for the underlined part would be your already twice try-PTCP.PAST to eat=PTCP.PRES-ACC.NEUT.SG bread. [I've marked the present participle ending as a clitic with = because that's the innovative part about this: it's usually a suffix that attaches to a verb root, but here it's used as a clitic that attaches to a whole VP, including another participle and two adverbs.] Somewhat surprisingly, the whole thing actually felt grammatically acceptable to me...)

[din]

Hah, I'm not German, but although it does sound a little funny, I had no trouble understanding the sentence immediately.

The Dutch equivalent, "...dan kun je je al twee keer geprobeerd te etene boterham eten" sounds much weirder to me.

[hwhatting]

dein schon zweimal versucht zu essendes Brot

Honestly, that sounds totally ungrammatical to me. Understandable, but misconstructed.

[----]

Caught myself today almost saying "That's where I'm from around"

[Yng]

Caught myself today almost saying "That's where I'm from around"

what's wrong with that? 'from around' is a perfectly acceptable preposition stacking and then you've just got normal dangling prepositions at the end of the sentence

[din]

Sounds pretty weird to me. I'd say 'around where I'm from' (if that has the same meaning as what you were going for)

[----]

Caught myself today almost saying "That's where I'm from around"

what's wrong with that? 'from around' is a perfectly acceptable preposition stacking and then you've just got normal dangling prepositions at the end of the sentence

I guess it seems weird to dangle two at the same time (even when one is inside the other). It certainly felt weird to say.