6.0081 Rs: da DAH da DAH da DAH (8/163)

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(2) --------------------------------------------------------------20----
Date:         Mon, 15 Jun 92 23:59:42 EDT
From:         "W.J. Paul Haynes" <UGU00026@VM.UoGuelph.CA>
Subject:      Da dah da dah da dah
 
 
 
Dennis, I saw your message on the list and, wondered whether you had
considered that _The Police_ had done a song a number of years ago in which
the chorus went "Da dee dee dee, Da dah dah dah, That's all I've got to
say to you"? It may be possible that this could have had some impact
upon the entrance of this particular phraseology into the language.
 
Sincerely,
W.J. Paul Haynes
B.A. Undergrad, English/History, University of Guelph
(3) --------------------------------------------------------------21----
Date: Tue, 16 Jun 92 9:41 BST
From: PARKINSON@vax.oxford.ac.uk
Subject: RE: 6.0079 Q: 'da dah da dah da dah...'
 
This reminds me of the sequence "dee-dum" or "tee-tum" traditionally
used to fill out a line of verse of which one has forgotten (or not yet
written) the rest.  It is most easily applicable to crudely scanned
iambic pentameters:  Brahms & Simon's parody of Shakespearian England
*No Bed for Bacon* has a notable actor declaiming
    I come tee-tum tee-tum tee-tum tee-tum
    I go tee-tum tee-tum tee-tum tee-tum...
Hence a typical ration of three or four "dee-dum"s or "da-dahs"...
Stephen Parkinson,
Oxford University
(4) --------------------------------------------------------------80----
Date: Tue, 16 Jun 92 6:00:26 CDT
From: Aubrey Neal <neal@ccu.UManitoba.CA>
Subject: Re: 6.0079  Q:  'da dah da dah da dah...'
 
dennis,
There was an Annie Hall: "Lah dit dah, Oh well, Lah dit dah....
 
(5) --------------------------------------------------------------18----
Date: Tue, 16 Jun 1992 07:54 EST
From: MORGAN@LOYVAX.BITNET
Subject: Re: 6.0079  Q:  'da dah da dah da dah...'
 
 
What about the old "la-de-dah"?  It conveys the general idea of disdain
which your quotes seem to require; repetition of the final syllable
could produce the "da dah" etc.
 
Leslie Morgan
(6) --------------------------------------------------------------40----
Date: Tue, 16 Jun 92 08:22:00 CST
From: (James Marchand) <marchand@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Subject: dada
 
Dennis' remarks on daDA are right on.  There are numerous such devices in
the language, things such as hesitation devices, continuation devices,
vocal qualifiers, authenticity codes, sincerity formulas, thing-a-ma-bobs,
etc. which do not get treated, I think in part because they are hard to
write.  Dennis' continuation device is not all that recent.  It was already
in use in my youth by my mother and her family, but in the form ta-DA, that
is, with a voiceless dental stop in the first syllable, and that is the
way Gleason used it.  This would shoot the morse code theory down.  On that,
by the way, I got reprimanded at Scott Field during the big one (WWII) for
not being willing to talk in dot-dot, dit-dit (we said da-da, d[barred i]-
di, no t).  There are so many things like that in the language -- another
is blah.  Robert M. Adams, "Authenticity-Code and Sincerity-Formulas,"
The State of the Language, ed. Leonard Michaels & Christopher Ricks (Berke-
ley: UCP, 1980), 584: "I'm not one of those phoney verbal types who can go
blah blah blah all day ..."  In German, we say Quatsch Quatsch Quatsch,
kind of like our word for the sound a frog makes.  There is a great one
used in Yiddish, kind of like a cat's meow, but nasalized: Er hot gezugt
myaah, myaah "He said blah blah".  According to Mencken, Supplement Two,
p. 647, the b-word gets treated by Louise Pound in American Speech, April
1929, 329-30, with synonyms.  As a sometimes (quondam) classicist, I should
mention that blyctrix is Latin for blah, treated frequently in treatises
on vox in the Middle Ages, under buba blyctrix.  Incidentally, if you want
to speak a foreign langauge without an accent, concentrate on the hesita-
tion formulas and the methods of blending -- then you can get away with
murder.
Jim Marchand
(7) --------------------------------------------------------------25----
Date:   Tue, 16 Jun 1992 11:59:53 -0400
From:   Martha Parrott <Martha_Parrott@poczta.utcs.utoronto.ca>
Subject: da dah
 
I first heard the da dah "dribble off" in 1982/83 from a friend who customarily
used "Rah da dah da dah."  It seems to me that the "R" makes it a little more
forceful.  My friend was a native Torontonian, educated in various parts of
Southern Ontario, who made occasional business forays into Pittsburgh; I have
no idea where he picked this up, or whether he thought he invented it.  Since I
have a musical bias, I've always associated it with the "dah dah" syllables
that people use to produce melodies without words--as in "da da da dah" for the
opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which phraselet has now of course become
a pop fanfare used to announce pseudo-important news.
 
Martha Parrott
University of Toronto
(8) --------------------------------------------------------------41----
Date: Tue, 16 Jun 1992 11:53 -0500
From: HDCHICKERING@amherst
R: "da-DAH da-DAH"
 
No new printed examples, but I seem to find this sound pattern
elsewhere in popular culture. In the TV version of "Peanuts" Charlie
Brown hears his teacher speak only as a trombone,
WA-wa-WA-wa-WA-wa-WA. Since the natural pulse of English speech is
trochaic, I wonder about Prof. Baron's iambic item: often it begins
with a stressed syllable, DAH, da-DAH, da-DAH. What is the function of
the first stress there, or is it just the truncated first foot
permitted in verse?
 
The iambic rhythm and sing-song intonation seem to be what carry the
meaning. The phrase seems always to be dismissive or derisive, as
well as completive. The same semantic and syntactic roles seem to be
played by the dactylic YA-da-da, YA-da-da, also heard at the end of
sentences and which might be modeled on "yackety-yak."  Until others
comment, I see Prof. Baron's "and on and on (and on)" as the best
candidate for the base-statement behind da-DAH-da-DAH-da-DAH. The
playground or the mall seem likelier sources than Morse code.
 
Might a related piece of language be "and like that," often heard as a
sentence-ending in teenage speech? Also, why is Prof. Baron's item
heard only in doublet or triplet form? What rules govern the choice of
the doublet vs. the triplet?
 
                                Howell Chickering
                                English Department
                                Amherst College
                                HDCHICKERING@AMHERST

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