Nico Muhly reports on especially efficient language use:
So last week, I was in Los Angeles and needed to buy gifts. One of the many reasons I fear LA so much is because you can’t STROLL and buy stuff; you have to make a whole Agenda and drive from place to place and deal with parking and whatever else. I hauled my cookies to Barneys, which was a complete bordello of fabric and screaming; it was two days
after Christmas and everything was on MegaSjúper Sale. I witnessed one of the best pieces of language. There were these two really tall, really outrageous sort of voguey dudes in noisy shoes clicking and clacking up the stairs, and when they got to the top the following thing happened:
[Sees the huge banner saying 70% off]
GIRL.[Sees the huge swarm of people shopping]
Girl.[They make their way through the crowd and discover that all the sizes left on the rack are XL and XXL and/or dumb pink Dolce & Gabbana things.]
Oh, Girl
Language Log looked at similar cases a while back, in particular in postings about dude, including one with an all-dude cartoon exchange. As Mark Liberman said on that occasion:
People seem to be especially fond of these single-word conversations with newly-discovered slang like dude. One reason for this was featured in Scott Kiesling’s American Speech article – such jokes fit the always-popular view that youth culture has degenerated to a linguistic level barely above grunts and squeals. I think there’s another side to it as well, seen from the other side of the fence: incoming slang is a sort of secret language, expressing exquisitely shaded meanings that are shared among the in-group but are baffling to outsiders. But what the outsiders are missing is not so much the lexical items as the shared cultural context, and so it’s not so easy as learning a word definition. The all-dude cartoons are a way of making that point, and I suspect that’s why natives of dudespeak seem to like them even more than the members of pre-dude generations do.
(Hat tip to Ned Deily.)
