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Jokes and covert language attitudes: the curious case of the wide-mouth frog

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2008

Alan Dundes
Alan Dundes
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Abstract

In the early 1970s, a strange piece of whimsy circulated orally in the United States. The modern joke in question concerned a ‘wide-mouth’ frog who evidently lacked the knowledge of what to feed its newborn babies. In the course of his or her attempts to question other animals about their normal regimes of infant diet, the wide-mouth frog is eventually put in the position of having to radically alter its customary speech pattern. This piece of folklore thus contains an explicitly metalinguistic aspect. Let me present representative texts of the story before discussing its possible significance.

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , June 1977 , pp. 141 - 147
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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