12 - So long, and thanks for all the fish…

Summary

Remember the waitress we mentioned at the beginning of , the one who sued her former employer, Hooters, after winning a “toy Yoda” when she thought she had won a Toyota instead? Well, not only did her story make the rounds in the press and on the Internet, but it also caught the attention of law professor Keith A. Rowley who published an article about the case before it had been settled (as it turned out, the waitress got the Toyota after all). Predicting that Hooters would spend more money on legal fees than it would have, had it just given her a Toyota in the first place, Rowley offers this tongue-in-cheek conclusion: “If you are going to use the farce, beware of the dark side.”

Throughout this book, we have used samples of humor such as this one to explain linguistic concepts, and even here, at the book's end, we can't help doing the same. Riffing off the “toy Yoda”/Toyota pun at the heart of the initial prank, Rowley plays on sound similarities between the words farce (over-the-top comedy) and force (the power that Jedi master Yoda wields in the Star Wars universe). The only difference between them, obviously, is the vowel at the middle of it all, and as we've discovered (in ), vowels are notoriously flexible and subject to variability in pronunciation. Of course, Rowley's pun is even more powerful for its having used, as material, the popular metaphor of Star Wars which powered the initial pun that led to the lawsuit. In fact, what makes the Toy Yoda lawsuit and Rowley's comment on it so memorable is the fact that they both play linguistically with very familiar material. “Use the force!” is a phrase that virtually anyone in the English-speaking world will recognize. So, it's no accident that it, and other familiar expressions, get used and reused to power jokes. In a 1996 Chaos panel by Brian Shuster, we are presented with a drawing of Luke Skywalker as a child on his adoptive planet Tatooine, sitting at the dinner table, eating with his hands and making a mess of himself. His adoptive aunt tells him, “Use the fork, Luke!” Here again, the difference between force and fork comes down to one sound, [s] vs. [k].