Have you watched a movie, listened to a song, or read a book and learnt a new phrase, term or word that was previously alien to you?.
I remember clearly watching Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers and wondering what a “bear claw” was.
Turns out its a pastry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_claw_(pastry)
Anything else you have learnt from entertainment?
Joni’s Blonde in the bleachers.
I presume this means bleached denim clothes. But it could also be the cheap seats at a baseball stadium.
Blonde in the bleachers…. sounds like a way of saying someone is a “natural” blonde
cheap seats, no shade
Dustin Hoffman and Babs going on about a”chimichanga” in Meet The Parents caused a big WTF? Turns out it’s a deep-fried burrito – bleee!
More pastry – I’m reading the new Colin Bateman book in which Dan Starky tells his client to go to the cafe across the road and order some tea and two German biscuits. I had to Google it. Turns out they’re those biscuits with two rounds of shortbread and a blob of icing with a cherry on top. Maybe it’s a Nor’n Ireland thing.
We call ’em Empire Biscuits in Scotland.
Friend of mine just gave me: ‘filibuster’ from (of course) ‘Birdhouse in Your Soul’, They Might be Giants.
‘So the room must listen to me
Filibuster vigilantly…’
Kitty-corner from Neil Young’s Pocahontas means diagonally opposite.
John Martyn’s Big Muff contains caterempously, According to the sleeve notes for One World “It’s a Jamaican word where the person is not as literate as they think they are, so people have conversations like ‘Good Morning Mr Thompson, How you gasiating this morning?’ ‘Yes, Mr Collins, most caterempously, thank you’. It’s a put down. I love it. That’s what I find intriguing about that whole caper. I love any form of language whatsoever, especially when it takes the piss out of itself.”
Ry Cooder’s ‘John Lee Hooker for President’ contains the line ‘I want everybody to know I’m strictly copastatic’, which according to Urban dictionary ‘It means watever you want it to mean. Nobody really knows’.
Bizarrely I learned ‘kitty-corner’ from an American exercise download: ‘…now put your chair on the kitty-corner’. Huh?!
My wife is American and I often have to google phrases she uses. “Kitty corner” was one of them.
I reckon The West Wing and it’s US political phrases left many of us scratching our heads.
Well, filibuster was a significant plot point in a WW episode – The Stackhouse Filibuster, I believe. And sadly I knew that from memory.
I’m exporting a special kind of joy to America, by trying to use as many obscurata as I can
Aimee Mann song “Cigarettes and Red Vines”.
Turns out red vines are a twisty American red licorice thing. Very nice too.
“Would The Christians Wait 5 Minutes, The Lions Are Having A Draw”.
Having a draw is stopping for a fag break, as our American cousins would never say.
and Poughkeepsie is pronounced pəˈkɪpsiː/
You’ve clearly forgotten The French Connection, Popeye Doyle is constantly accusing ne’erdowells of picking their feet there. Obviously the habit of a rum cove.
‘Rum Cove’ is that down from Brandy Cove?
Levantine (but in Swedish).
I bought The Maltese Falcon in a charity shop and Mr Cairo was always described as “levantinen”, meaning the Levantine – a word I’ve never heard in my life and didn’t know what it meant.
So during the first half of the book I just assumed that it was a discreet old-fashioned way of calling someone gay…until I looked it up (and it took three dictionaries before I found one that listed the word and gave me an explanation).
Of course, since this happened I amuse myself by saying “Aha, he’s Levantine!” whenever someone’s gay… 😉
Sericulture – silkworm farming, used by the Human League in Being Boiled
Mahoot – someone who sits atop an elephant, “steering” the animal. Joan Armatrading in Drop the Pilot.