did people hate you for no reason?

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swell is the cat's pajamas, the bee's knees

Cat's pajamas? What's so great about bees' knees? Do bees really have knees?

I wonder where some of those phrases came from.

courtesy of the dictionary of American slang, vol. 1, 2 [and soon to be 3].

Wow...now I KNOW I'm old LOL...I have used all those words including swell, groovy, rad, rap (talk, not the musical genre), Neato Keano...there's a bunch more that are just so cliche and specific to that time period but I can't think of many more right now. I think I did the swell, neato and other words of that time period because I always hung around adults or older kids.

do young'uns nowadays still use the term "bitchin'!" to refer to something cool? when celine dion and her hubby the recently deceased producer first worked together, after one of her recorded takes went well he shouted that word and she was upset, thought he was upset at her, he had to explain American slang to her.

Yeah...I actually had that happen to me too. As a matter of fact, I have had a couple of bad, borderline racist jokes play out before my eyes.

Remember "Miss Swan" from "Mad TV?" There was some point in just about every sketch that she would gaze off into the air say "Heeeeee, looka like-a mannnn."

So, one night the wifenstein comes home and tells me about some guy harassing her on the train. I asked about him, she said something I didn't really get. She was hung up on his nationality. I asked what he looked like...I swear to God she looked out into the air, squinted and said, "Heeeee looka like-a mannnnn."

She could not understand why I was laughing so hard.

hmmm, am not familiar with mad tv but by any chance is your wife ESL?

Yeah, and street learned. She refused to go to classes because 'it wasn't making her money.' Swear to God.

if you don't mind, where is she from? my mother was Japanese, the style of speech sounds familiar to me.

Miss Swan was supposed to be based off of Bjork. I always assumed she was supposed to be Korean. Who knows?

Miss Swan was a generic Asian character. Things like her Nail salon (see? cliche there) was named 'Gorgeous Pretty Nails Beauty Salon' which she mispronounces as "Goji Pitty Booty Nay Salon", had the makeup to accent a 'sorta' almond eye shape, adding the vowels at the end of consonants, things like that. And, I hate to say it, but I've known a few mainland women who looked just like her. The helmet hair style, dress style, etc. They grew up under Mao...what can you expect?

Here's a quick look at the 'catch phrase'


The wifehole is from China. Many shared English issues with the Japanese, but not on the L and R thing. And, she does not hang around people who really want to learn English. One of those self segregating things.