As many of you know, (or at least those who follow American current political events), the US government shutdown yesterday. It seems to have affected most everyone in one way or another, whether they have been furloughed and not allowed to work or being unable to get a title for a car. This blog is not political in nature, so a discussion of the shutdown is not what I want to talk about. Instead, I want to talk about the humor that some have injected into this issue via Twitter, using the hashtag #shutdownpickuplines. One of my Facebook friends was kind enough to have liked (or shared, I can’t remember which) a link to a compilation of the “20 best shutdown pickup lines,” which I’ll post for your enjoyment here.
But what makes these so fun? That’s really what I want to get at. And why do we enjoy them so much? (Or I guess, why do I enjoy them so much?) I think, besides the fact that it’s injecting humor into what would otherwise be a humorless situation, it’s playing with the English language in a fun way. Bad pickup lines are ubiquitous in today’s society I would argue, and they seem to be “bad” because they’re puns. Take for example “If I could rearrange the alphabet, I would put u and I together.” Here we have a pun, or again, what I would call a pun, on the meanings of the pronouns and the letter that have different meanings. In the cases of these shutdown pickup lines, there are instances of taking words that are typically meant to mean one thing but used to mean another, injecting humor and play while they’re at it.
In a sense, that’s the fun of language. We know what words mean and what they mean in our everyday lives, but we can also choose to innovate with them and create new expressions and situations, if only to distract ourselves from the truth which isn’t fun to face (in this case, the fact that quite a few people are unable to go to work and the whole host of other negative consequences that have arisen from the shutdown).
Again, I don’t want to stand on my soapbox talking about the shutdown, but merely comment and appreciate the innovative spirit that language speakers have in our everyday lives. Because that’s the beauty of language, we can utter things that invoke two different readings. We can play with our words, and it’s completely acceptable. We can create new phrases and inject humor into a situation by use of words alone.
So, to paraphrase one of my favorite pickup lines that’s missing from the page I linked, but I believe I saw on Huffington Post or the Washington Post: “The archives may be closed, but I have another national treasure to share with you.”
Verba Volantia 