AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
See ya later alligator sayings8/8/2023 Part I showcases two YouTube examples of this song. Part III of this pancocojams series includes my editorial comments and some article excerpts that I believe corroborate my position that the sayings "See you later, alligator", and "Afterwhile, crocodile" originated from and were first popularized by Black Americans.Ĭlick for Part I of this pancocojams series. alligator and its usual response "After while, crocodile". Granted, if these are miniature poems, they aren't very sophisticated, not villanelles or complexly idiosyncratic free verse poems.This is Part III of a three part pancocojams series on the popular catchphrases "See You Later. Each of these rhymes is really a couplet or pair of couplets (or, I suppose, one could interpret each as an internally rhymed single line of verse): The most famous of these is See you later, alligator the usual response is the equally all-purpose In a while, crocodile.Īlong with all of these slangy things, rhymes like What's your story, morning glory? or How's it goin', protozoan? are poetry, or at least verse they are, in some elements, poetic. Of course, there are lots of rhyming salutations, farewells, and queries some of them are generic and familiar, slang clichés. Moreover, the author thinks that they are a verse and poetic and describes them as rhyming couplets. Additionally, it talks about the differences between rhyming slang and these phrases. įurthermore, the book Slang: The People's Poetry (by Michael Adams) describes these phrases in a variety of ways, as in rhyming. Īlso, we can call the latter part of the phrase a rhyme-tag:Ī word or phrase used primarily to produce a rhyme. If you’re a native English speaker you’ve probably heard a few popular rhyming catch-phrases like, ‘see you later, alligator‘ or ‘after a while crocodile‘. I've found the relevant excerpt below and there are usages in Google Books as well. I believe there isn't a well-established term for these phrases but there is a general term used that is based on the term catchphrase: Is there a word or phrase that precisely describes expressions of the form ", "? I am open to suggestions like these but my preference lies with terms more like antimetabole, a word I recently learned from ELU which focuses more on the structure or composition of the phrase than on its sound. The idiom restriction aside, I suspect there may be a term like iambic pentameter or Oom-Pah-Pah to describe the rhythm these phrases make when spoken. But growing up we had a book called "See You Later, Alligator" it contained the alligator and crocodile phrases, but it also had ones that were something like "See you on the veranda, panda" and "See you in pajamas, llamas." Because these opening phrases are not idioms or figures-of-speech, my ideal term does not include them.Īnd even organism may not quite capture the terminal phrase, as shown in Jeebs' example using a title in 2002's Men in Black II: "Let's make it happen, cap'n." So I have generalized it to rhyme. Now I wanted the term also to include the quotes from Community, most of which (an example being "You're on your own, Al Capone") are preceded by a phrase that is not a salutation. Then I remembered other examples from the musical number Telephone Hour in the 1963 film Bye Bye Birdie, in which teenyboppers greet each other on the phone with phrases like What's the story, morning glory?Īnd I've found several pages of lesser-known but valid examples of what I wish to describe, some examples being "So long, King Kong" and "Mañana, iguana." So I was tempted to label this question "Term for ', '." I found a phrase that loosely encapsulated these with the Wikipage for Parting Phrases. The most familiar instance is likely "See you later, alligator." And because it brings to memory the similar "In a while, crocodile," Browsing the web, I came across this image of the cast of the television show Community using a type of structure familiar to me, and I wondered if there's a name for it.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |