I stumbled across a bit on phatic speech acts, and thought it might make for a nice comic to compensate for yesterday’s horrid pun. And yet, I couldn’t help throwing in another bad pun. Oh well.
Anyway who’s with me – replace all phatic expressions with made up nonsense words! Wooo!
Also, omg back-to-back comics? It’s been a while since that happened…
I’ve noticed you tend to pretty much always qualify your puns with “bad.” In fact everyone does this. Why do you make excuses for your puns? Either they’re cool and you shouldn’t be embarrassed, or they’re cringe-worthy and funny for that reason. Don’t be ashamed. And even where they might be neither especially humorous nor humorously lame, we know you really are proud of them; you aren’t fooling us.
Actually let me rephrase that last part:
And apart from this, we know you really are proud of them; you aren’t fooling us.
It’s a higher order evaluation; when they first occur to me, I am proud. But on reflection I am ashamed both of the puns and my pride in them.
Another thing people do when they make puns is to state whether or not they are intended. -_- They are always intended in an important sense if you’re aware of them.
On topic. I didn’t know there was a name for this. A friend of mine always begins phone conversations with “Yes, it’s me” (In danish). Obviously no matter who is talking, it is always ‘me’. His utterance conveys no useful cognitive meaning, but the listener can identify the person by the voice, so some information is conveyed nonetheless. It’s a very interesting language phenomenon. 🙂
I’ve actually started avoiding saying “you’re welcome” unless I actually mean that they are welcome to the service I have provided. Instead, i say “no problem” or “no trouble”.
Good! Now do the same to ‘How are you?’ and ‘What’s up?’.