Tuesday, November 06, 2007
A retrospective
Last night, after "I Love New York 2" and "The Hills" were over, JerseyGirl and I got sucked into "Pageant Place." If you haven't seen "Pageant Place," it's the Donald Trump-produced reality show about the bitches who won the Trump family of beauty pageants, and how they all have to be roommates at Trump Plaza. Unfortunately, there's not any coke-fueled, boozed-up lesbian beauty queen orgies going on as past events would lead one to expect; I guess the Donald ruined that party when he shipped Tara Conner's skank ass off to rehab last year. The cast of characters include the porcine-faced lesbo cokehead Miss Teen USA who allegedly hooked up with and then betrayed former Miss USA Tara Conner, the current Miss USA Rachel Something-Or-Another, Miss Universe, and just for fun, Tara Conner, because she doesn't have anything better to do and she stirs up trouble. Miss USA was complaining about how the super bitchy Miss Teen USA was a total diva when they went to help out at the Gay Men's Health Crisis AIDS Meals-on-Wheels kitchen. Miss USA took issue with the fact that Miss Teen USA was unaccustomed to actual labor and was afraid of getting burned by manning the plate-warmer. While commenting on Miss Teen USA's work ethic, Miss USA, a woman best known for taking a header in the Miss Universe pageant, said, "She hasn't paid her dues in that retrospect."
Retrospect? Since when was that word interchangable with respect? Either she just read Jabberwocky and was so inspired by Lewis Carroll's invention of new words via linguistic recombination and decided to try it herself with "respect" and "perspective," or Miss USA's dumb ass simply has a lousy vocabulary and thought this was a fancier way of saying "respect." Needless to say, JerseyGirl and I assumed the latter and had a field day with it.
"R-E-T-R-O-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me!" I sang.
"Actually, that dumb ho should just find out what it means...PERIOD," said JerseyGirl. She was the editor of that finest of all college news publications, the Smith College Sophian, and shares my disdain for people who can't speak, spell, or punctuate proper English.
For the rest of the night, we kept saying shit like "show me some retrospect!" and "no disretrospect intended," and being perpetually amused by this. JerseyGirl wondered how many of the other TV junkie Americans watching "Pageant Place" noticed Miss USA's linguistic gaffe. We both imagined that, as "Pageant Place" is on MTV, the number of people with a sufficient grasp of the English language to differentiate "respect" from "retrospect" was probably depressingly low.
However, I figured that this was something I could answer empirically with a good old-fashioned experiment. From now on, I'm going to start replacing "respect" with "retrospect" and see not only who notices, but who actually points out the error. I am hypothesizing that of those who do notice, most won't actually bring it to my attention. I can't wait to see the looks on people's faces as they try to figure out whether or not they should be like, "Uhhh...do you mean 'respect?'" Then it's going to be even more awesome when I respond, "Nah, dude, I mean 'retrospect,' it's fancier!"
Good times ahead. I'll report my results in an upcoming issue of Science or Nature. Or, if for some reason those journals don't want to publish my groundbreaking study on the verbal stupidity of the average person (person=grad student, who the hell else am I usually around?), then I'll put it on the top-tier online science repository known as this blog.
Retrospect? Since when was that word interchangable with respect? Either she just read Jabberwocky and was so inspired by Lewis Carroll's invention of new words via linguistic recombination and decided to try it herself with "respect" and "perspective," or Miss USA's dumb ass simply has a lousy vocabulary and thought this was a fancier way of saying "respect." Needless to say, JerseyGirl and I assumed the latter and had a field day with it.
"R-E-T-R-O-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me!" I sang.
"Actually, that dumb ho should just find out what it means...PERIOD," said JerseyGirl. She was the editor of that finest of all college news publications, the Smith College Sophian, and shares my disdain for people who can't speak, spell, or punctuate proper English.
For the rest of the night, we kept saying shit like "show me some retrospect!" and "no disretrospect intended," and being perpetually amused by this. JerseyGirl wondered how many of the other TV junkie Americans watching "Pageant Place" noticed Miss USA's linguistic gaffe. We both imagined that, as "Pageant Place" is on MTV, the number of people with a sufficient grasp of the English language to differentiate "respect" from "retrospect" was probably depressingly low.
However, I figured that this was something I could answer empirically with a good old-fashioned experiment. From now on, I'm going to start replacing "respect" with "retrospect" and see not only who notices, but who actually points out the error. I am hypothesizing that of those who do notice, most won't actually bring it to my attention. I can't wait to see the looks on people's faces as they try to figure out whether or not they should be like, "Uhhh...do you mean 'respect?'" Then it's going to be even more awesome when I respond, "Nah, dude, I mean 'retrospect,' it's fancier!"
Good times ahead. I'll report my results in an upcoming issue of Science or Nature. Or, if for some reason those journals don't want to publish my groundbreaking study on the verbal stupidity of the average person (person=grad student, who the hell else am I usually around?), then I'll put it on the top-tier online science repository known as this blog.
Labels: beauty queens, grammar gestapo, JerseyGirl, retard rage, science, sluts, TV
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
