One of my favorite RAMH regulars kindly forwarded this video to me. It’s a clip from a 1944 film called Broadway Rhythm, and the performers here were called the Ross Sisters.
More information on the girls can be found (naturally) on Wikipedia. The video’s been around long enough that I should be embarrassed not to recognize it (especially since I’ve got a copy of That’s Entertainment III, which Wikipedia says includes the bit). But I’m enjoying it too much to be embarrassed.
Innocent times…
For those of you who are writers or artists, do you have any “tricks” which you knowingly perform — because you know you’re good at them (even if you don’t usually admit it, for the sake of modesty or other reasons), and because they’re identifiably yours? Take your last name, or your commenting handle, and add an -ism suffix to it (e.g., Simpsonism): what are your characteristic isms, that is, your bits? what’s your shtick?
Hm. This is an interesting topic, simply because I don’t know if I do this and how to identify the -isms when I do. And it’s inevitable. I do.
I think one habit I have as a writer is overuse of adjectives and adverbs to ram a point across. Or leaving too little to the reader’s imagination in descriptors.
Other than those, I’m lost. Time to introspect, I suspect! ;)
We had to watch that one twice.
I always get rather queasy watching this kind of act: you feel sure they must have broken their backs.
I suppose I am moderately notorious for my beermat flipping. You know, where you balance a beermat on the edge of a bar counter or table with an inch or two protruding over the rim, then bring your hand up from underneath, flicking the protruding edge of the beermat with the tips of your fingers so that it jumps in the air and performs a 180-degree rotation, and catching it cleanly with the same hand in one easy, continuous motion.
It’s fairly straightforward to do it with just one, even when you’re a little squiffy. The challenge is usually seen as being to discover how tall a stack of beermats you can flip and catch without dropping any. I don’t like this approach: it seems to me to be pursuing failure rather than success; it inevitably ends with beermats littered all over the floor and much embarrassment.
I prefer to elaborate the trick by switching to using the left hand. Or, when I’m in the groove, to do synchronous flips with the left and right hand. Or to try flipping with the palm upward (strangely, this is much, much harder than the conventional palm-down technique). Or, when I’m really showing off, to attempt left- and right-handed flips, one palm-up and one palm-down. What larks!
However, I’m not sure that this is really unique enough (although I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else attempting the last variation, other than in emulation of me), or sufficiently distinctive of me to be labelled a Froogism.
I prefer to think of Froogisms as my occasional self-composed bons mots, particularly the ones I share with friends in text messages.
I have hunted down some characters but thus far not so many ‘ism’ though I did note something I (tended to) call the ‘warning signal’ in someone particular last year.
(Froog, In three and a half years of drinking aquantantince I have never seen so much as a half a beer-mat-flip. I am missing out!)
I’m with Froog on the idea that those sister’s couldn’t possibly have done that act without displacing something! Ewwww.
As for somethings that I seem to do, I suppose it would have to be the stringing-together-of-words-as one kind of thing I find myself doing in lots of my writing. Would that be a cynthesis? HA!
Darc: A lot of what I imagine to be Simpsonisms is, I believe, really just an amalgam of borrowings from other people’s isms. I don’t know where I got it, for example, but I know that when I look at a string of sentences I’ve written which all begin with the word “I,” I go back and strip out all the “I’s” because it feels like I’m cavorting onstage. So I start a lot of sentences with subject-less verbs, a la, “Went to the store. Picked up a loaf of bread. Thought about PB & J, too, but didn’t act on it.”
Sherri: it is strangely compelling, isn’t it?
Froog: Coincidentally, the evening after I posted this I caught a Seinfeld re-run of the episode called “The Apology.” One of the story lines in that episode features Jerry’s girlfriend, Melissa, who liked to walk around his apartment naked. He really liked this, of course, until he realized that there’s “good naked” and “bad naked.” Such as when she coughed, when something got stuck in her throat. Afterwards, Jerry and George are in Monk’s coffee shop, and they share this conversation:
As soon as he mentioned the guy catching the cannonball I thought back to this video, and burst out in inordinate laughter.
fg: This “warning signal” of which you speak — it’s someone else’s ism, or your own???
cynth: I like to think about the rehearsals leading up to the filmed version of the act. Like, how did they decide that enough was enough? what was the cutoff point between “It needs to be a little weirder” and “Okay, just right!”?
“Cynthesis”: portmanteau word!
that video freaked me out. at least cirque de solie doesn’t attempt to incorporate potato salad (or any other food for that matter) into their creepy crawlie body tricks. *shudders*
My Knisterism shtick is much in evidence at http://drinksbeforedinner.com
Hi JES, it was someone elses ‘ism’ and strangely compelling only in that we both recognised and teased about it. (its is often so much easier to see someone elses ‘ism’ as opposed to our own. But then if it matters how do you tell them…)
With writing I feel ‘ism’ maybe more quantifiable? I’m thinking of your comment above.
I sometimes struggle with whether to use “one” or “you” in sentences both spoken and written. I wouldn’t say it is an ‘ism’ as such but I notice it because I find myself reading texts back and swapping these two words about. I think it is a tiny bit interesting actually because these two words suggest to me that I am witness in a small permanent shift in the norms of the English language. Part of me wants to hold onto the old, “one” to retain something of the past but then it doesn’t quite fit (seem fitting) these “modern” days.
Eileen: Apparently you’ve got company in the freaked-out category. Somewhere in the last year, maybe, in some movie or other, I vaguely recall someone acting out an inchworm: lying flat on his stomach, curling head and feet up (like a shallow “U”), and them bringing them down, repeatedly, with each flexion (?) moving forward another six inches or so. I had to avert my eyes after about five seconds of that.
Barry: So I see — Knisterism by the boatload! (Er… carload, maybe???)
fg: The “you” vs. “one” dilemma is very tough, even for somebody who imagines himself comfortable with words. I tend to favor a sort of personal informality in my writing, so I go with “you” more often. But this has two negative side-effects:
But I do like the idea of being present at a time when the language might be undergoing a big change — present at such a time, and aware of it.