Well, actually, just to the memes that were popular around me while I was in college. Most of these come from songs. I am tired of memeing around my American friends and having them be like “wut???”, so I am educating you all now.
I. [X] does give me me powers
The origin of this meme is the song Phenomenal by Benjai. It come from the line “Soca does gi’ me me powas; ey-ay”. ie: “[Caribbean music genre] makes me powerful; [sound of enthusiasm]”. The specific way this is used varies a lot.
Most commonly, it’ll be a comment on how something has given you the ability to do stupid things faster with more energy. “coffee”, “ganja”, “cocaine”, “manga”, and “pumpum” (ie: vagina) are all things I heard people say gave them powers (it has to be two syllables to fit the song). Alternatively, if your friend has just done something stupid, you can comment on it this way – usually attributing their sudden energy to something silly as a form of ribbing.
Alternatively, you can use it as an image macro, as we often do on WhatsApp (yes, we’re whatsappers). The general format here is a call-and-response macro. The first image is of the thing giving the powers, with the caption “[thing] does give me me powers”. The second image shows someone doing something silly, with either the caption “Ey Ay”/”Eh I” or the caption “See me deh/dey/there”.
Example from WhatsApp:
However, the punning potential is great and terrible
(I’m a horrible person, I know)
And, thus, you have been educated! Which is great, because I am constantly tempted to use this meme, and then have to refrain from it to avoid confusion. But no more! Go forth and meme like a true rudeboy
How does “[X] does give me me powers“ parse syntactically?
Specifically, what is each “me” doing? Do they both mean the same thing, and were just repeated for the meter to work? (Or for emphasis? Does [Redacted]-dialect repeat nouns for emphasis?)
Or are they doing different things? Are they both ~something about the speaker~ (with some grammatical effects), or is one of them totally unrelated?
“me” is the first person singular pronoun.
Yes, there aren’t first person singular pronouns. There is only one. It does the work of English I, me, and my.
So, replacing the ‘me’s with their equivalents, we get “Soca does give me my powers”.
But wait! What’s the “does” doing here?
It puts the sentence in the present tense, because “Soca give me my powers” would be past tense. The unmarked form of a verb in my dialect generally is.
So the sentence parses as “Soca gives me my powers” in standard English.
Ah, so that’s what the “does” was for.
(The doubled “me” didn’t confuse me, personally: my language-parsing module saw the second one, said “ah, it’s the cockney ‘me’”, and continued on. Apparently I’ve consumed enough British media for “’me’ can be used as a possessive” to be an available thought.)
—
On an unrelated note: is it just me*, or does that song–especially the chorus–sound very…itself? Like, a song they would play over a location-establishing shot. “HAVE WE MENTIONED YET THAT WE’RE IN THE CARIBBEAN??”
Not in a bad way, just…intensely Caribbean.
*It might just be me and my lack of experience with the genre.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #language #the more you know #music #also #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #because that was indeed a great and terrible pun
i cant believe its daylight savings time and i havent seen the “hello its me your cousin oskaar from iceland” video on my dash yet you are all slackers
i guess i have to do all the work around here dont i
Tags:
#oh my god #Daylight Savings Time #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #IIRC I’ve seen this video going around before but never actually watched it #so glad I did this time
For beautiful plants and flowers that don’t require sunlight or water check out the work of Ithaca, NY-based artist Owen Mann, whose handmade ceramic succulents and blooms will never ever wilt.
Tags:
#but before I go #plants #sculpture #art #pretty things
I spent so much fucking time trying to figure out how to translate eat me to make this joke and it probably isn’t even correct don’t look at me
Tags:
#language #food #puns #(I have absolutely no idea whether the translation is correct but I appreciate the effort) #Pi Day #now if you’ll excuse me I need to go eat some pie
so tonight I’m at synagogue, listening to the Purim Night reading of the Book of Esther, like you do
and near the end of this chapter my brain presents me with the following:
nooooo ooooone plots like Haman calls the shots like Haman plans a genocide by casting lots like Haman
(It only works with the Hebrew pronunciation of Haman, which, like Gaston, is accented on the second syllable.)
By the time we get home my brain has added:
for there’s none so well-favored and kingly yes, we all can be certain of that he’s so rich that his pockets are jingly and he looks really sharp in a three-cornered hat
*face in hands*
Petition to sing this every year at Purim.
I shared this with my dad, and he added:
No one’s spruce as Haman, Nor abstruse as Haman; No one’s half as good tying a noose as Haman! He’ll use gallows in all of his decorating! No one else hangs as well as Haman!
do the hogwarts cafeteria tables have a restriction on who’s allowed to get coffee? i want to believe there’s safety measures in place to make sure ravenclaws don’t get a six cups a day habit before they hit puberty but this is a school that encourages its students to play high-speed flying murderball so
yeah no this is hogwarts aka murder high
pretty sure the slytherins could be doing cocaine off the desks in potions class without getting in trouble, and hufflepuffs definitely sell weed out of the greenhouses
gryffindors, of course, only get high on righteousness and violence
Tags:
#Harry Potter #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #drugs cw #death mention
I feel like this is the kind of conversation that would make @wayward-sidekick go “no no no wrong wrong WRONG”
Because saying “I’m fine” in response to being asked how you’re doing is only supposed to happen if you’re trying to avoid a conversation. That’s how polite answers work! You use them to make the other person stop trying to speak to you, basically.
If you’re asked how you’re doing by someone you’re trying to start a conversation with, you never say just “fine”. You give a descriptive sentence or two. You try to optimise that sentence for containing as many potential things to talk about as possible, in the hopes that the other person will find one of them interesting enough to ask about.
If I were asked how I was doing by a stranger right now, I’d say “I’m doing pretty good! I recently got back from a trip to [visa country redacted] with an American friend of mine because I was interviewing for a visa.”
With the obvious potential follow up questions being:
When did you get back?
How was your stay in [visa country]?
Have you been to [visa country] before / do you like it there?
Who’s your friend / why did they go with you?
How did the interview go / did you get approved?
Which country are you travelling to?
What kind of visa did you get?
etc etc etc
There is no question you can ask someone who says they’re fine. “fine” kills a conversation. That’s its job. Like, you can’t even ask someone “why are you fine?” the way you can ask “why are you happy/sad/angry?”
There is just… Literally no worse way to attempt a conversation. But people do this all the time. I don’t get it at all. But, like, if you actually want to talk to your mutuals more, consider… Not choosing literally the worst response to a question that you can.
This has been Moderate Social Competence with Alison.
I just realized I answer that question like that, all the time, even when I want to talk to he person, because… somehow I internalized the idea that talking about good things in my life is bragging and talking about bad things is complaining; I’m supposed to talk to the other person about their life.
This runs into problems when both people in the conversation have this idea.
Oh, wow, yes. That would definitely run into a problem.
The ideal is for both of you to talk about your lives. The Social Optimum is something like 50/50, but it can depend a lot on who’s the better storyteller and who’s the better listener in a given situation.
(Though, like, it’s important to note that being the better listener isn’t the Important Virtuous Role to take. People like listening to good storytellers. Ideally you want to be good at both of these things so you can swap roles a lot.)
If you aren’t sure who should do what and the other person isn’t going first, you probably want to start by giving the other person opportunities to ask about your life. Then you talk a bit about what they asked about before asking them if they have any related experiences.
Examples:
You: […] and that’s why I don’t like coffee. Person: Yeah, me neither. You: What drinks do you like, then?
or
You: […] and I really don’t understand why someone would like golf in the first place. Person: I like golf! You: You do? What do you like about it?
or
You: […] and I can’t believe he’d just leave like that! Person: Yeah, that sucks. You: Has anything like that happened to you before?
So, like, things in that general vein. You always want to be able to get the other person to talk sometimes, and this is a great way to lead into it. Especially because most people are more comfortable talking about their own lives if you’ve opened up first (especially if it’s a similar topic).
And, if someone has just finished telling you about something in their life, it’s usually nice to respond by talking about similar things in your own life so it seems like you’re ~relating~. The major exception to this is situations where it might seem like you’re one-upping the other person by talking about your own thing.
Actually, I feel the opposite of called out right now.
See, I internalised much the same idea as robustcornhusk, but not “somehow”: I was actually explicitly told to always respond to “How are you?” with “Fine.” I’ve seen multiple socialisation PSAs to the effect of:
“Nobody actually cares how you’re doing, or if they do it’s only by pure coincidence. ‘How are you’/’Fine’ is a ritualised call-and-response greeting, not a literal question/answer pair. Only ignorant autistics or pedantic assholes treat ‘How are you?’ as an actual question to be given an actual answer, and someone who acts like a pedantic asshole–intentionally or unintentionally–is not someone other people want to be around.”
(Of course, the sort of people who think this is rude are also the sort of people who won’t tell you that to your face. I don’t think I’ve ever even heard such PSAs from anyone who knew me personally, just in general broadcasts.)
I usually do still give informative answers to “How are you?” when I’m looking to start a conversation, and (to bring in another branch) I do use recent interesting events from my life as conversation starters. But I do it because, of the options available to someone at my level of social competence, it’s the least of all evils. (Hell if I know how the PSA-writers start their conversations. Probably something too subtle for me to pull off.) I generally have a lingering awareness that this is the Wrong Thing To Do.
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