Google is not a great help, to many variations on a theme.
In the vernacular of teenage kids…white, smart and reasonably well brought up..what is this Victrola remark.
It does not exist over here on this side of the great divide and it is killing me.
My remarks about white,smart and reasonably well brought up are not meant to be offensive..those who take them offensively are on their own here.It is a simple question about the development of modern slang..and Victrolas.
Well, Dub…to be sure, I did run this by my 15 and 17 year old girls. And they haven’t encountered it. Perhaps it is limited to a particular part of the country. Often things start in the west and migrate this direction.
It was a joke. There were some messages about words which had originally been specific to one brand of item but which had come to be applied to a whole class. A Victrola was originally a specific make of 78 rpm record player but for a fairly long time it was applied to any 78 rpm record players- not that there were any other speeds in those days. Walden said that the same had happened with Gramophone in England but I’m not familiar with that. Other examples are Hoover and Frigidaire.
I was curious, so poked around on the internet. I have no idea in what context you’ve heard/seen “victrola” used as slang, but I found this:
Students used metaphors to create shared meanings with their classmates, even explaining new words to reduce possible misunderstandings. “Looking back at the chat, my comments seem like you may have created a monster. The proverbial vaccination with the victrola needle. Student 10, are you familiar with the term Victrola? It is a brand of record player. Being vaccinated with a Victrola needle means a person talks a lot” (S6, 2-20-97).
[rant]
That section of the thread reminded me how much I hate the commercialization of speech. It seems that it is getting harder to say a sentence without risking a trademark defamation lawsuit. It McSucks.
[/rant]
It is not about a commandering of popular speech, it’s about a living , vibrant language.A language that exists above and beyond the needs of those who speak that language.
I’m afraid I’m the guilty party here. I don’t know that my teenager would even know what a Victrola was, and Steve’s little joke just gave me the idea to extend it in my usual “can’t-think-of-anything-original-but-I’ll-play-along-with-others” way.
I think that what dubhlinn is referring to is what Carol S. wrote –
I hadn’t heard of it either, but I checked with my two 12-year-olds, who set their antiquated dad straight in no time.
“Victrola” is kid-talk for an old fogey, stick in the mud, dour humorless individual, the kind of person, they say, who just sits around all day eating twinkie crumbs off their T-shirt and flicking the fly specks off their glasses. It comes not from Victrola the old record player, although that makes perfect sense, but from Brandon Victrola, the main character in the Samuel Jackson Perlman series published by Scholastic books. Brandon is just that kind of a character, and Perlman has written a whole series of “Victrola” books about his comical efforts to become part of society – “Victrola in School,” “Victrola Goes out for Football,” “Victrola’s Surgery,” " and their favorite “Victrola at the Prom,” which they like because it actually has the word “breast” in it.
Sample Victrola humor:
Victrola: How many teachers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
BobbyRay (Victrola’s only friend): I don’t know, Vic. how many teachers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Victrola: None. She just fills out a maintenance request and turns it in at the office and the janitor changes it.
The kids like it because it’s kind of absurdist, anti-humor.
