On the Chicago UPN station at 7 am on weekdays a miraculous thing happens. If one turns to that station a time machine pops up in the living room and those late twentysomethings and early thirtysomethings are transported back to their childhoods...to a time when Strawberry Shortcake was manufactured on every possible item and the Smurfs were on tv.
That's right, the Smurfs are on tv! On network tv, not cable! And I watched them this morning as I remembered sprawling in front of the tv with my dad (a closeted Smurf fan) as he supposedly read the paper and I took in the adventures of the little blue beings.
My 6 year old brain never caught the strange ways the Smurfs use language and now that I'm paying attention I think we should adopt the Smurf ways. In this particular 15 minute episode (because the Smurfly creators can of course compose an entire story arc with suspense and moral to fit into 15 minutes) Smurf phrases kept catching my attention. My favorite was "Well, I'll be Smurfed" but then there also was, "That wasn't very Smurfly." The word Smurf is more than a noun, but a verb and an adverb as well - I bet we could figure out the adjective if we tried.
I'm not suggesting that we should adopt the word "Smurf" and its variations, but perhaps another word that better describes us. "Well, I'll be peopled!" might work, but I don't think "That wasn't very peopley" sounds very good. The word human in the same context would sound funny as well. Maybe if we considered the Smurfs as a separate nationality rather than species and so we would say "Well, I'll be Germaned (or Irished, Brazilianed, Japaned)" and "That wasn't very USly (or Russianly, Tanzanianly, Indianly)." We would have to be careful to speak only of our own heritage here. I'm not sure this is the answer.
This started out as humorous musings, but as I think about the different ways that we identify ourselves I realize that certain religious terms would fit quite well into the scheme. But, I don't want to put those in. What phrase can we come up with to use as an exclamation or expletive? What can possibly as cool as "Smurf"?
2 comments:
La la la LA la la.. .la la la la laaa... Oh I did love those smurfs. Especially The Magic Flute episode. Or was it a movie? Wanna know what Smurfs are called in German? Schlumpf. Anyone know how they're translated into other languages??
If you've not yet seen the movie Donnie Darko, you should, for nothing other than the very disturbing Smurf conversation.
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