b l o g o s

lady goo goo

I've got other, more private spaces where I'm posting pictures and videos of the new (now not so new!) baby, but sometimes there might well be baby-related spillage of the discursive variety onto blogos. And of course there is the whippet-baby combo in the upper left. Given that both JM and I are in the business of language, and that I have written about imitation as a means of learning, blogos seems the appropriate place to document what happened today.

What happened is this: the baby imitated us both when we said "goo goo" to her. Now, she is only nine weeks and some change, so we were both in turn rather startled when she did this. She did it with JM first while he was changing her diaper. Thinking it was a fluke, he repeated the experiment again and again. Then he brought her down to me and told me that I might think he was crazy, but that she just imitated him saying goo goo. So I tried it, and she did it with me too. We would of course go crazy praising her when she did it, which made her smile and giggle as if our words were tickling her. Beyond the praise, we went back and forth goo-gooing like eight or nine more times until she got tired and started to squeawk (that's my new word for one stripe of noises she makes). But pre-squeawk she was very definitely saying "goo goo."

Bananas. 

Dear Courtney Love,

It has recently come to my attention that you claim to have originated the phrase "kookoo bananas." First off? you don't even spell it right--it's "cuckoo bananas"--and second? My bff E! has been using that phrase since at least the the fall of 2007, and I have cited her here before and could offer much earlier emails as proof if you like. JM even used it in his class this past spring, after I visited E! in the ROC in January and brought it on home with me, like a little catchy head cold, and one of his students wrote on an evaluation form that JM was not only a great professor, but that he used the student's new favorite phrase, "cuckoo bananas"!  We called E! at once to tell her about the phenonemon she had created. That student, Ms. Love, has probably never heard of you, having barely entered elementary school when your band Hole slipped back into the ether. (I still spin to "Awful," btw--it's a great little sprint song.)

What is more, your claim to have coined the phrase, or to own the phrase "kookoo bananas" reminds me of my off-and-on grad school boyfriend (or whatever) who swore he invented the phrase "fuckin-a taco" in college. He kind of liked Nirvana too, for what it's worth. Here's something: I never really believed that he invented that phrase; in fact, I have been known to tell people about his claim when I want to thumbnail his cocky mofo-ness. (grad school bf, if you're reading this, hi!) People don't exactly "invent" phrases like that, and when they do, they often don't take. I can think of two exceptions: 1) Metaspencer's "undergrounduate library", and 2) E!'s "cuckoo bananas." C.b. is a very handy phrase, because a lot of things these days are in fact c.b., like, just to take a random example, the fact that the nominee of a major political party can't even talk about googling, let alone do a google search without the help of half his staff.

sincerely,
debbie