Over the years my dad has added to his diction a number of phrases that he has taken from popular culture. He’s pulled from a myriad of sources, and most make me laugh on a regular basis. Here is part one in what is going to be an ongoing list.

“Supwichoo?”

This one was a little hard to figure out. In late 2001 my dad began asking me “Supwichoo?” in a high-pitched voice that I could only guess was his idea of a jive-talking black man. I asked him where it came from, and he couldn’t place it. “Just something I heard,” he told me. After giving it some time, one day it just came to me: the trailer for “A Walk to Remember.”

In case you don’t remember, “A Walk to Remember” tells the tale of Landon Carter, a troubled teen whose life is turned around by a (SPOILER ALERT!) terminally diseased Mandy Moore, who “doesn’t care what people think,” and teaches Landon to do the same. Landon’s popular clique of friends aren’t pleased when he ditches them for the dowdy daughter of a preacher. One of Landon’s friends asks him, “What’s with you, man?” His pronounciation of “with” though, sounds much more like “which.” A quick search online yielded the trailer, and I was able to isolate the line:

The genius of this is that there is no special emphasis placed on the scene, or this line in particular. It’s just business as usual in the trailer world, yet for some inexplicable reason this line stuck with my dad and is how he begins practically every telephone conversation we have.

“Yo Yo”

The Wire is one of the best shows currently on television. It’s a sprawling, angry, novel of a show that has attempted to shine a light on society’s ills while telling the story of police and drug dealers in Baltimore, Maryland. The writers make it a point to have some of the most authentic dialogue on television, and as a result, nearly every “hopper” or drug dealer, greet each other with “yo yo.”

My dad’s usage of this phrase is confined mostly to emails. He’s used this as the subject line of more emails than I can count, and then in an interesting turn, he starts the emails with the exact same phrase.

“Yeaaah. Give him some noise.”

This one dates back about 10 years. Some local bmxers put on a demo in downtown San Luis Obispo and my dad and I attended. The bmxers began the demo by playing Jimi Hendrix’s version of the star spangled banner from a cheap stereo, while they held their hands over their hearts. Then one of the dudes busted out with a super cheap mic/speaker combo and began to hype up the crowd. His enthusiasm was certainly commendable, but he didn’t have a whole lot of material. The phrase he relied on most often was “Yeahhhhh, give him some noise,” after someone performed a trick, which happened quite often over the course of the demo.

I’m not sure how it came about, but over the years this phrase began to be used when either myself or my dad would let out a burp or a fart. It can also be utilized when either one of us has done something commendable, but its main usage is to herald the emittance of gas.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 18th, 2006 at 1:29 pm and is filed under dad. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.