I Have Spoken

This morning I was watching Toon in with ME, an early morning show on the MeTV network featuring Warner Brothers, MGM, and Fleischer Studios cartoons. They had a Popeye cartoon on, ‘Service with a Guile’, in which Popeye and Bluto compete in helping Olive Oyl attend to ‘the Admiral’s’ car at her service station, which of course devolves into their usual fracas. At one point, Bluto draws a grease gun and announces, ‘A squirt for a squirt,’ then proceeds to sabotage the one-eyed sailor’s efforts. I was immediately thrown back over fifty years.

‘A squirt for a squirt’ was a phrase that me and my brothers would sometimes use when playing with the hose on a hot summer day. We had a repertoire of such sayings, cadged from intense viewing of cartoons and movies or reading of comics, the recital of which amounted almost to a secret language among us. They weren’t often the most characteristic catchphrases from such sources, such as ‘You swewy wabbit!’ or ‘Blow me down!’ but oddments or ‘zingers’ that somehow caught our attention. When ‘Darmok’ aired, the famous Star Trek: The Next Generation episode that features an alien race speaking entirely in metaphors, I knew almost immediately what was going on.

Even today, when two or three of us brothers are gathered together, such phrases will inevitably surface somehow, emerging unsummoned and then disappearing again like the Loch Ness Monster. They have been called Babelisms, Babelese, or the Babellian Language.  Spouses and children will look at us askance, but we nod our heads knowingly. Occasionally we will explain, thought it might take a while. But most often we are the native-code speakers, of a language that will certainly be lost, and which cannot really be explicated or passed on.