Languages in LA

Lingo is important in Hollywood. I’m an outsider, but I have ventured into the waters a few times here, and it’s soon evident that if you speak the lingo, you can slip right onto a movie set with no one the wiser.

For anyone wishing to crash the set of a movie, I offer the following suggestions.

1) The quickest way to participate is to be an extra. They have to hire union extras up to a point, then they can hire non-union. Most non-unions register with Central Casting, which is supposed to help you get jobs. In reality, however, they are mostly useful for giving you a veneer of movieland respectability. Therefore, register with them, but do your own research. When you find the set you want to crash, be ready to say “Non-union, but registered with Central Casting.”

Say it fast: “Nonunionbutregisteredwithcentralcasting”. Practice that.

2) The place to find on set is basecamp. Yes, very pretentious. Nevertheless, two things you want to be able to ask someone who has a walkie-talkie are “Where do the extras wait?” and “Where’s basecamp?” The portable bathrooms are at basecamp, so you’ll want to know, see.

3) Finally, remember that Hollywood takes itself quite seriously. One must not wander into the tent where the extras are corralled and confess “I thought it would be fun to see if I could be in a movie.” They’ll call security on you. But if you say brightly, “I’m a spec”, suddenly, it’s okay! You are speculating on work. They look at their list of possible extra positions and ask if you are union. Remember your answer? Good.

They always say that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. But Hollywood is really more like a sulky lover: It’s not what you said. It’s how you said it.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, in the Valley, they speak strangely. Valleygirl-speak has been a joke, or a reference point, since the 1980s. Now comes a comedian named Liam Sullivan, with his alter-ego, Kelly. Kelly is an internet phenomenon who is catching on the way weird things do, like the lip-synching Numa-Numa guy from a few years ago, who brought to the national consciousness the astonishing revelation that there is any such thing as a Moldovan pop song.

Kelly (Liam in glasses and a blond wig, looking like the female version of Garth in Wayne’s world) is a Valley girl whose upper vowels have dropped, and whose lower vowels have palatized until they’ve nearly switched places. She’s a shallow, staring, reactionary mouth-breather, the sort of teen that parents fear producing. And people love her.

“Shut up, betch!” She says, and darned if it isn’t funny. Kelly first caught on in a bizarre YouTube short called “Shoes”. The entire skit is about this obnoxious girl shopping for shoes. “Oh my God, shoes”, she drools, staring in store windows. The whole skit is set to a beat, but the most amusing thing about it is Liam’s impersonation of the current Valley accent.

“These shews are three hundred dah-lers…

These shews are three hundred dah-lers…

These shews are three hundred dah-lers…

LET’S GYET-UHM!!”

If Kelly’s vowels all keep lowering at the rate they are going, we’ll soon have jokes like the British do about their vowels raising:

A judge halts proceedings in his court when he realizes that he left a pertinent document at his cottage, where he’d been perusing it over the weekend.

“Fax it up, sir,” suggests the bailiff.

“Yas, it does, rather,” muses the judge.

I don’t know if this is specific to Los Angeles or it cropped up all over the country in 2004 and just happened to coincide with my move here, but personally I think it’s an L.A. thing. People don’t say “you’re welcome” anymore. It’s too formal, apparently, even chilly. I thought we’d all settled on the easy-breezy, “No problem” in reply to thanks, but that lacks the panache that we crave out here on the coast.

So now it’s “No worries”.

At first I thought it was just my property manager, to whom I get to apologize often because I traipse in late with the rent about once every three months. “No worries,” she’d say, and I’d think “Isn’t that an Australian thing? I thought she was from Canada”. Then I noticed my neighbors from New York and Illinois, also chirping “no worries”. The guy at the coffee shop, from Alabama, has no worries. Most of the waitresses and bartenders I encounter are similarly unworried by my abrupt changes in drink order.

I am wondering, now, if this is an indicator that Australia is the new Europe. Americans love to borrow European slang to show off how cool we are. For a while, everything was “brilliant”, but that soon faded. Perhaps Europe isn’t the ‘in’ thing anymore. Perhaps we will start saying “I got into a blue (fight),” and telling people to “rack off” when we are tired of them. Maybe we’ll all “have a naughty” instead of getting laid.

I suppose it’s too soon to say. For now, all I can assume with any assurance is that nobody in Los Angeles is worried. Well, not the white people anyhow. Hispanics are still worried, probably for good reason, but that’s a whole different blog entry.

When I first came to L.A., I was struck by how many people would say “my bad” instead of “excuse me” or “I’m sorry” or “oops”. I confess, I’ve never liked it.

It seems too blithe, too easy, too short. It’s almost flippant to hear adults using a phrase that sounds so infantile. The word “bad” is so basic, it’s one of the first words babies learn. Even dogs understand a stern “Baaaad!!” It’s on the Swadesh word list, for Pete’s sake. It has even less distinctiveness than “nice”, as in “Oh, that’s nice, dear.”

There’s also an observable lack of actual apology or regret attached to the phrase. It really does not mean “I feel bad about this, I should not have done it, I am sorry”. It just means, “Yeah, I screwed up”. It’s acknowledgment, and little else.

“My bad” is no more attractive coming from children than it is from adults. My students use it constantly. You didn’t do your homework? “My bad”. You lost your pen? “My bad”. You were swinging your padlock around on the knotted end of your gym shirt and you whacked Min Sun on the face with it, and now she’s bleeding and crying in the nurse’s office? “My bad”.

There’s a real lack of any sense of perspective when you can use the same phrase to excuse ‘lost-my-pencil’ as you use to excuse ‘incapacitated-the-best-student-in-the-class’.

I am about ready to start snarling at anyone who says “my bad”. I will be glad when it becomes uncool, probably somewhere around November of 2009. I only hope nothing even more flippant replaces it. I can just imagine someone slamming into my car at that evil intersection at Hillhurst and Sunset before shrugging and offering, by way of apology, “Yep, that was me”.

My students, who are largely Hispanic, have an odd habit of not using the word “ask”. They don’t want to say it, and will perform bizarre circumlocutions to avoid it. At first I thought they were simply being rude. After all, it can sound quite accusatory when I tell a student that he needs to be taking notes, only to have him point at his friend and reply, “I told him can I have a pencil!”.

But this amusing oddity could get a child in trouble when I choose a volunteer to pass out the workbooks and an unchosen one wails, “I said can I do it!!”

Oh, you said, did you? You told me, did you (hands on hips)? Finally it occurred to me, since they are mostly ESL students, that they didn’t realize that the word is “ask”. Trying to get them to say it, however, produced a bit of a struggle.

“You mean, you asked me if you could pass out the books?”
“Yeah, I said could I do it when I came in, remember?”
“Yes… you ASKED if you could do it.”
“Yeah, I said!”
“SAY ASKED!”

Reluctantly, they mutter, “I ASKED can I do it.” For a while I wondered if it was just the difficulty of the SKT sound in “asked”, so finally I went to one of the Hispanic teachers. He mulled it over and finally opined that in Spanish, they would use the equivalent of “said” or “told” more often than they would “preguntar” or “pedir” (to ask.) So apparently it’s just a direct translation phenomenon.

Well, I can’t fault them for that. Direct translation has gotten many people in trouble. It once caused JFK, in Berlin, to accidentally say he was a jelly donut. Let that be a warning to us all.

I remember, long ago, it was widely believed that Eskimos had a dozen words for snow. No, it was even more, perhaps a hundred! They had a word for every different kind of snow there was, be it wet, soft, dry, new, or old. They had a word for snow in different shapes, such as drifts and ripples, words for the different-sized flakes, even. Because snow was such a large part of their world, you know.

Geoffery Pullum, linguistics professor at University of California, did his best to clear up the misunderstanding, explaining that Eskimos had an agglutinating language (where words “glue” together to form new words). Therefore, in their language “drifting snow” would be all one word. So, well, in a sense they had many words for snow, but they were no more profound than our many phrases for snow, like “dirtysnow” and “slushymess”.

What is interesting, though, is how many people ran with this legend when it first made the rounds. Why yes, of course, the Eskimos would have a hundred words for snow. They’d define it down to its most minute properties! Because it’s everywhere!

I’ve lived in Los Angeles for three years, and I’m waiting to see whether Angelenos have a dozen words for palm trees. So far, I haven’t heard a peep about them. There’s the fan-shaped type, the spiky type, the fuzzy type, the smooth type, the barky type… actually, I haven’t even heard anyone say anything along those lines either.

It is all too easy to believe in the exotica of others. Imagine how amused we’d be to find that Eskimos believe that in Los Angeles, we have a hundred words for palm trees. We don’t even have that many words for dippy starlets who get DUIs while running around with no panties on.