This contribution was prepared within the framework of the P6-0038 programme financed by the Slovenian Research Agency (ARIS).
1Among the intersubjective phrasemes as defined by František Čermák [2007: 433], there are various types of phraseological replies; for example, pairs of greetings or other routine formulas that are necessarily realized in dialog, but also replies of a more humorous type – “stock conversational witticisms” according to Neal Norrick [1984: 196-198, 1993: 26, 2007: 304-305] – that respond to first-person statements unconventionally. Research on this type of phraseological replies has been most fruitful in the context of Slavic languages in recent decades.
2Norrick [1984: 196-198, 1993: 26, 2007: 304-305] describes these as retorts (punning and non-punning) and also as “responses to standard requests”, and in his classification of set phrases in conversational humor he includes them among “stock conversational witticisms” alongside greetings (e.g., Fancy meeting you here) and leave-taking formulas (See you in the funny papers). Norrick explains that banter such as Have you got a match? – There’s no match for me and Have you got the time? – If you’ve got the place “skew the meaning of their associated requests through punning misunderstandings of words like match and phrases like have the time.” Permyakov [1988: 89] mentions the so-called humorous answer among paremiological genres. František Čermák [2007: 432-433] divides phrasemes according to whether one speaker is sufficient for their realization (monosubjective phrasemes / idioms) or whether they require the participation of at least two speakers (intersubjective phrasemes / idioms). Among intersubjective phrasemes, there are various types of phraseological replies. In the English chapter of his monograph Čermák [2007: 433] describes them as “witty facetious reactions to some remarks” and gives the following English example: It’s coming. (e.g., a tram) – So is Christmas. Ewa Kozioł Chrzanowska [2015a: 160-163] names these type of expressions “dialogues and quasi-dialogues”; according to her, they present a contrast between atypical and unexpected answers and conventional questions.
3Unconventional phraseological replies were defined as “inadequate, mostly humorous or absurd replies of person B to the statement made by person A” (Meterc & Pallay [2019: 166]). Their targets (statements by person A) are conventional, frequent, or even fixed everyday one-word or multiword utterances such as What?, Why?, What time is it?, or What’s for lunch? (Meterc & Pallay [2019: 166]). They are also termed dialogue idioms and defined as “set combinations of phrases occurring only in immediate oral interaction” (Khairov [2019: 241]). The term “unconventional reply” does not indicate a lack of phraseological stability, but a violation of conventionality in communication (which is replaced by a new kind of conventionality: phraseological conventionality). Unconventional phraseological replies are fixed expressions and many of them are familiar to a large proportion of speakers. In an extensive internet survey (Meterc [2023: 73-74]), in which more than 1,600 Slovenian speakers participated, it turned out that out of 250 unconventional replies, about 80 are known by more than 50% of the speakers. In our opinion, the term unconventional reply is a more appropriate term than e.g. humorous reply, as humor is merely a possible side effect of making an unconventional connection between two statements (Meterc & Pallay [2019: 167]).
4Some researchers have addressed the function of these terms. Norrick [1984: 207] points out the functions of retorts that, “by casting etiquette and politeness to the wind, speakers use to indicate to their listeners that they are speaking freely among trusted friends”, and says that “they can also be used to relieve tension in embarrassing or generally difficult situations.” Norrick [1993: 22] also observes that “once the pretending misunderstanding is recognized as a joke and prompts a small laugh, its speaker usually returns to the serious mode and gives an appropriate response.” Permyakov [1988: 89] says that humorous answers have a negative communicative function, which, in view of the types of paremias to which he assigns the same function, must be understood in the sense of stopping communication and not in the sense of negative evaluation of these replies as such. Dobrovol’skij and Baranov [2003: 39-40] name this type of phraseme an answer formula and point out that the main pragmatic function of responses of this type is to indicate the inappropriateness of the previous speech act of the communication partner, but they can also introduce additional meanings into the situation. Unfortunately, Dobrovol’skij and Baranov do not explain what they mean by “additional meanings”. Bondarenko [2013: 28] and Kozioł Chrzanowska [2015a: 98] suggest that the key to understanding humor in phraseological replies is Bakhtin’s concept of carnivalization. The more frequent, usual, and fixed a certain statement is, the more likely it is to become the target of an unconventional reply because unconventional phraseological replies are used not only to avoid giving an answer but also to attack frequent patterns that lead to the automatization or even uniformization of communication (Meterc & Pallay [2019: 167]). They violate the cooperative principle because they deliberately disregard the maxim of relevance emphasized by Grice [1975].
5The use of unconventional phraseological replies is characteristic of private communication and spoken language (Dobrovol’skiy & Baranov [2003: 39-40; Bondarenko [2009: 644]; Meterc & Pallay [2019: 171]). Even replies that proved to be known to eighty percent or more of Slovenian speakers are extremely rare in texts. When searching for such an expression in the Slovenian language corpus metaFida v 1.0, which comprises more than 4.6 billion words, one finds between zero and a maximum of five examples, whereas equally well-known proverbs occur in a range between five hundred and one thousand or more occurrences. This is surprising, since internet language (Crystal [2001: 47]) contains elements of both oral and written language, and the language corpora included in metaFida also contain many texts from social media such as X (the platform formerly known as Twitter). For the reasons mentioned above, the internet was the best of the worst among the possible sources for phraseological replies before starting research via questionnaires: “Unconventional replies occasionally pop up in internet forums or blogs. When we googled a unit, we sometimes found similar unconventional answers in a forum discussion or in the comments section” (Meterc & Pallay [2019: 171]).
6Not many examples of usage are found when searching for five unconventional English phraseological replies using the ukWaC language corpus: 1) Are you free? – No, I’m expensive; 2) What time is it? – Time to get a watch; 3) Hey. – Hay is for horses; 4) I love you. – I love myself too; and 5) See you. – Not if I see you first. This corpus contains mainly British English, comprising more than 1.8 billion words from websites with the .uk domain. Two of the phraseological replies (Hay is for horses and No, I’m expensive) are not found at all; among the others, Don’t call me Shirley is the most frequent with fifteen usage examples, followed by three examples of Not if I see you first and one example each of I love myself too and Time to get a watch. Therefore, internet memes in which phraseological replies are used are particularly valuable phraseological material.
7Anneli Baran [2012: 171], who has analyzed the use of phrasemes in internet memes, points out that the use of written and oral language has blended, and the creative context of the internet has given new life to figurative expressions because people interpret them differently in spontaneous virtual communication than in a traditional face-to-face conversation. Ewa Kozioł Chrzanowska [2015b: 143], who has studied the relationship between memes and paremiology, notes that dialogic forms are gaining popularity in modern times with the help of internet memes; at the same time, she adds that it is necessary to check whether individual forms are actually dialogic expressions or expressions that are monologic and therefore closer to proverbs.
8The use of phraseological replies in memes differs significantly from their use in online discussions. Online discussions are similar to real discussions except for their asynchrony (and sometimes anonymity). Note that also in online discussions it is difficult to find phraseological replies in prototypical use according to Čermák’s criteria [2007: 572-573]: we found many more of these expressions (both in English and in Slavic languages) in cases where internet users talked (mostly with nostalgia) about phraseological replies from their childhood. Among the distinctive features of internet memes as sources of information about phraseological expressions, we note the frequent inclusion of cultural references and the fact that their graphic image often provides additional information about the (albeit fictitious) speech situation.
Figure 1. No, I’m expensive (https://imgflip.com/i/7t7xee)
9In some cases, the message of the meme can be understood from its visual image; the meme in Figure 1 is about the anger of person A, who hears the reply No I’m expensive from person B.
10Mieder [2015: 39] lists lines that have become proverbs from popular films; for example, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer” from The Godfather (1974) and the often-heard “Life is like a box of chocolates” from Forrest Gump (1994). Other types of paremiological and phraseological expressions have also originated from movie texts. Section 2.1 shows how the unconventional reply “Don’t call me Shirley” came about, based on Leslie Nielson’s line which was originally a quote from the movie Airplane! (1980). The reply is all the more memorable because it is repeated twice in the film: the first time when Ted Striker says to Dr. Rumack (played by Leslie Nielsen), “Surely you can’t be serious”, and he replies, “I am serious... and don’t call me Shirley”, and the second time when Ted Striker says to Dr. Rumack, “Surely there must be something you can do” and he replies, “I’m doing everything I can... and stop calling me Shirley!” Judging by the internet memes, the first version of the reply (Don’t call me Shirley) is more popular. We also find no confirmation of the phraseological answer in the ukWaC language corpus when we look for the phrase “stop calling me Shirley” from the second quotation.
11From an interview with the filmmakers Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker in the magazine Vulture (Riesman [2016]), it is learned that the first scene with the reply Don’t call me Shirley, like many gags in this film, was conceived not only as a parody of disaster movies, but even a specific piece of dialog from the movie Zero Hour! (1957). As Jerry Zucker and David Zucker explain (Riesman [2016]):
Jerry Zucker: “The origin of that joke is similar to the origin of a lot of jokes in the movie: While we were writing, we used to watch a lot of old, serious movies that had a lot of this overly dramatic dialogue. We’d say, ‘Wait, wait, wait. Stop the tape’ and we’d go back and we’d put in our punch line or our gag in the background. That was one of those lines where someone actually did say, ‘Surely you can’t be serious.’”
David Zucker: “The other person might have even said, ‘I am serious.’ But we added the ‘Don’t call me Shirley.’”
12In the continuation of the interview, the makers of the film (Riesman [2016]) say that a lot of the dialog in the film was created this way, and they also say that they showed the film Zero Hour! to actor Leslie Nielsen before filming because they wanted him to see the style and that they asked the actors to play the scenes with serious expressions, as though it were not a comedy.
13The movie gags, which follow one another almost without interruption in this film, are similar in their parodic nature, but they are structured differently. Some were created in response to very specific events and statements; for example, a joke when the stewardess says “I’m twenty-six and I’m not married” and one of the passengers replies, “Well, to be honest, I’ve never been so scared. But at least I have a husband.” The mechanism for generating some of the gags in this movie should be compared with the typical mechanism for establishing a link between the stimulus and the phraseological reply known from phraseological research (Bondarenko [2009]; Khairov [2019]; Meterc & Pallay [2019]). According to an analysis of Slavic phraseological material (Meterc & Pallay [2019: 167-168]), the mechanisms for establishing a link between replies and target statements are most often based on 1) direct criticism of the statement; 2) a laconic reply, 3) an apparently incorrect interpretation of the target statement, or 4) an exact reply that does not provide any information. The mechanisms very often include rhyme and semantic relationships, such as homonymy and paronymy. In the case of phraseological replies, it is these relationships and connections between stimuli and replies that make a “good phraseological reply” to paraphrase the criteria that make a particular phrase a “good proverb” (Villers [2022: 9-10]). Among the gags, there are some that – just like Don’t call me Shirley – are structured as unconventional phraseological replies because it appears as though speaker B has not understood speaker A’s statement. Such replies appear twice in the movie Airplane! in response to a stimulus with the pattern X, what is it? in which X is a noun that person A repeats from a previous statement by person B:
1. Rumack: “You’d better tell the Captain we’ve got to land as soon as we can. This woman has to be gotten to a hospital.”
Elaine Dickinson: “A hospital? What is it?”
Rumack: “It’s a big building with patients, but that’s not important right now.”
2. Randy: “Excuse me sir, there’s been a little problem in the cockpit…
Striker: “The cockpit . . . what is it?”
Randy: “It’s the little room in the front of the plane where the pilots sit, but that’s not important right now.”
This reply is repeated in a slightly different form (without repeating the stimulus word) in Airplane II: The Sequel (1982):
Boy: “Can I ask you a question?”
Striker: “What is it?”
Boy: “It’s an interrogative form of sentence, used to test knowledge. But that’s not important right now.”
14This phraseological reply can be found in an internet meme with a motif from The Lord of the Rings (Figure 2). This internet meme is accompanied on Reddit by the text “... and don’t call me Shirley” from the user who posted the meme, and people who commented on this meme also gave combinations of movie quotes from both films, for example: “Surely one cannot just walk into Mordor”.
15Jokes referring to the similarity of the word surely to the name Shirley existed earlier in English, but they were not formulated in this way. One such phrase is Shirley you jest (instead of Surely you jest). Norrick [2007: 305] cites the phrase Surely you jest as a stimulus for the phraseological reply I’m not Shirley, but I do jest: “Conversationalists also recycle stock responses that pretend misunderstanding of set phrases. These pretend misunderstandings are themselves set phrases, which act as set responses to other phrases. Typically, the pretend misunderstanding involves a pun on the foregoing phrase, as in: Surely you jest. – I’m not Shirley, but I do jest, where the sentence adverbial surely is punningly equated with the homophonous proper name Shirley.”
16In an internet discussion (https://alt.usage.english.narkive.com/lkFXz0jD/shirley) in 2007, one internet user, Donna Richoux, in response to some people’s claim that they knew the phrase before the movie Airplane!, wrote that it was not possible to confirm the use of the reply Do not call me Shirley before the year of the movie’s release by searching Google Books. The search was repeated using Google Books for this article and yielded the same result: it was not possible to confirm the use of this reply. However, the fact that jokes based on the similarity of these two words were already present in the language can be confirmed by the name of the character Shirley Jest from the journal Yale / Theatre [1968]1, which was found when searching for these two words in Google Books.
17The reason for the popularity of this reply is related to its stimulus surely and is described well by Jim Abrahams in an interview in Vulture (Riesman [2016]):
Even in that line, “Don’t call me Shirley”, we pointed out that there are things in culture and media that we all take seriously that we don’t need to take seriously. I like to think, even today, when you hear in the news somebody say “surely” this, or “surely” that, I like to think that there’s a whole bunch of people around the world who hear that and kinda chuckle to themselves because they remember the line and they know they don’t have to take that seriously.
18The reply is all the more memorable because it is repeated twice in the film. Among the many movie quotes from Airplane! this quote is probably the most famous of all (Cotter [2019]): “Airplane! has a lot of great jokes but ‘Don’t call me Shirley’ is easily the most quoted. It’s doubtful the Zuckers and Abrahams realized how popular the line would become, and it has gone on to adorn t-shirts, memes, and even became the subtitle of the film’s DVD release.”
19The propagation of this phraseological reply has basically happened at every screening of the film Airplane! since the early 1980s. The rest of this article mainly focuses on the propagation of this reply in recent decades, although for a full understanding of the propagation immediately after the coining of the reply it would be necessary to include as much material as possible from the period immediately after the premiere of Airplane! in 1980. Because phraseological replies are being analyzed outside of their prototypical use – spoken communication in everyday conversation – it is known from previous research and experience with mining this phraseological material in Slavic languages (Meterc & Pallay [2019]) that one cannot expect much confirmation of their use in written communication. Nevertheless – besides internet memes, discussed below – with the help of Google Books it is also possible to find some traces of written use of this quotation in the form of a phraseological reply in the first decade after the phrase was coined. A phraseological reply was found in a dialog published in 1990 in the journal The VOYA Reader (Broderick [1990: 69]):
Teenage Girl: “Aaron Fricke will win for sure this year: Reflections of a Rock Lobster was epic.”
Teenage Boy: “Surely you jest! He doesn’t stand a chance against Douglas Adams, who is one of the greatest authors of all time!”
Teenage Girl: “No, I don’t jest and don’t call me Shirley!”
20During the coinage of the reply Don’t call me Shirley, the propagation of phrasemes had been possible for almost a century through dissemination by means of film (if one includes intertitles in silent films), but from the mid-1990s onward dissemination was able to increase through a range of internet media. In addition to internet memes, one must not forget the possibility of disseminating expressions by means of computer games, as described by Villers [2018] in the case of the proverb The cake is a lie, which was even coined for the text that appears in this game. The phraseological reply was also used in conversation in the videogame Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (released in 2007):
A: “We’re going deep and we’re going hard.”
B: “Surely, you can’t be serious?”
A: “I’m serious. And don’t call me Shirley.”
21Using the ukWaC language corpus we find fifteen examples of usage of this expression which is much more as in the case of the above mentioned five English unconventional replies. Here are some examples of usage in the ukWaC corpus:
But “surely”, you are thinking, “it won’t make any difference whether the two earth leads are connected or not.” Well, not on a normal bike, no. And don’t call me Shirley.
Surely one of the ugliest little boxes on the planet. Why on earth did Fiat design a car powered by a hair dryer engine, when in fact, there was only just enough room for the engine in this hideous little monster! ... and don’t call me Shirley...
The advice is? Ask people? It can’t be that simple surely? (don’t call me Shirley I hear you say)
22In the following example of an internet meme, the reply Don’t call me Shirley is used in combination with the popular humorous statement Surely not everybody was Kung Fu fighting (Figure 3), a common joke motif on T-shirts that refers to the lyrics of the song “Kung Fu Fighting” (1974) by Carl Douglas.
23In the internet meme in Figure 4, the word “but” is also included in the mechanism for establishing a link between stimulus and reply, which person B understands as the noun “butt”.
24In the internet meme in Figure 5, the pun is extended to the personal name Sirius from the Harry Potter series. Memes containing the phraseological reply Don’t call me Shirley and this character are very common.
25Similar to the internet memes with the Sirius character, the internet meme with George Costanza’s father Frank from the sitcom Seinfeld (Figure 6) also contains a play on words. In this example, the stimulus is modified so that the word “serious” is replaced by the word “frank”, which enables a play on words with the personal name Frank and also with the word “frankly”.
Figure 6. Frankly I hate it when you call me Shirley (https://imgflip.com/i/4w03wh)
26A phraseological reply was not the only thing that developed from a movie quote. A very popular joke is found on the internet, included in internet memes with various people (Leslie Nielsen dominates, as in Figure 7) and also outside internet memes: “Siri kept calling me Shirley today. I was starting to get really angry and then I realised why… I left my phone in Airplane mode2”.
27The American sitcom The Office (2005-2013) is one of many that use a line from Airplane! One can also mention the episode I Am the Walrus (S06E13) of the animated series American Dad, in which the reply is given in the form And please stop calling me Shirley. However, it is certainly one of the most famous – because of the character of Michael Scott and because of the repetition of this usage – which is described below. Michael Scott is one of the most recognizable characters from the sitcom television series of the last twenty years, and his statements and facial expressions are used in many internet memes. He uses a whole range of phrases, jokes (dad jokes), and movie quotes in his cringe way. He is known, for example, for the very frequent use of the unconventional phraseological reply That’s what she said, which is all the more inappropriate in the context of an office job due to its sexual connotations.
28Three examples of the use of this reply in The Office are presented here. In the episode Valentine’s Day (S02E16), Michael Scott manages to use the reply in the same way as in the original movie scene, when he responds to the stimulus “Surely you cannot be serious.” The scene is particularly funny because, immediately after the reply, Michael Scott looks directly into the camera and says the name of the movie with great satisfaction: “Airplane!” In the episode Job Fair (S04E13), he replies “Yes, and don’t call me Shirley” to a colleague’s statement “Are you serious?” although the statement does not include the word surely. In the episode Whistleblower (S06E26), he responds to the statement, “Oh, honey. Surely you don’t want that” with an adapted version of the reply, “I surely do, and don’t call me ‘honey’”, and incorrectly references it to Airplane II. This scene is also evidence of his constant effort to use this phraseological reply, and the special circumstance is that the scene takes place in an airplane, whereas the first two scenes in which the reply is used take place in an office.
29The first condition for the functioning of unconventional phraseological replies is a statement containing a specific stimulus. In two of the three uses of this reply by Michael Scott, this stimulus (the word surely) is not present, and so its use proves particularly unnecessary, unnatural, and off-putting: once the problem is solved by replacing the word surely with honey, but this does not provide a playful link between the target statement and reply, and the second time he uses a reply to a statement with no stimulus at all (Figure 8). Unconventional phraseological replies primarily relate to private communication between friends, family members, and the like, which is why Michael Scott’s exaggeration crosses the line into normal communication at work. Humor is only a possible side effect of making an unconventional connection between two statements, but very often this type of expression is used for other purposes that depend largely on the situation and the participants in the dialog (Bondarenko [2009: 647]). The use of the unconventional phraseological replies is very often considered bad humor by the speakers and an annoying, irritating interference in the flow of communication (Meterc & Pallay [2019: 177]). This is also confirmed by the reactions of all three characters to whom Michael Scott says the reply. None of the characters laugh; they react to Michael Scott’s reply mainly with a facial expression that shows a mixture of surprise at the inappropriate and bad joke, boredom, and even contempt. This is a typical character reaction to his statements, but it also says a lot about the series of jokes (in layman’s terms, dad jokes) provided in the script for Michael Scott’s character.
30This article has paid special attention to a phraseological reply whose cinematic origin is known and that is still alive in speakers’ minds. For the study of this somewhat more marginal (but no less interesting) type of phraseme, it is useful to look for examples of expressions for which their coinage is well documented, as well as, to a large extent, their manner of propagation.
31The phraseological reply “I’m serious. And don’t call me Shirley.” is very common in ukWaC compared to other English replies, considering that expressions of this type, which are very common among speakers, occur in small numbers in written texts. The reply was created on the basis of a deliberately selected stimulus (from disaster movies). In the movie, it appears in a group of movie gags, among which we find some gags constructed as an unconventional phraseological reply (e.g. to a stimulus with the pattern X, what is it?). The mechanism of establishing a link between the stimulus (person A’s target statement) and this reply is one of the typical mechanisms found in many unconventional phraseological replies: Speaker B pretends not to have understood speaker A’s statement. We found that, in addition to the movie Airplane! which acted as the primary propagating agent the use of the reply “I’m serious. And don’t call me Shirley” was influenced by some mass propagating agents (its use in the game Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and later in the sitcom The office) when we express ourselves in terms that are also decisive to the case of proverb genesis (Villers [2022]). Internet memes act as additional propagating agents, bringing further humorous modifications to the phraseological reply by mixing it with other popular quotes (e.g. the lyrics of the song “Kung Fu Fighting”), combining it with new references (e.g. from the movie Harry Potter) and constructing an entirely new joke from the use of this response (“Siri kept calling me Shirley today”).
32This article has analyzed the phraseological reply outside its prototypical domain of use: spoken communication and everyday conversation. Internet memes approach this sphere to a certain extent because they often represent dialogs, but they can also serve as a response in the context of a dialog between social media users. Their use in media (e.g., in the sitcom The Office) also approaches this domain, but these are preformulated scenarios that merely mimic spontaneous communication. To obtain a more comprehensive picture of the use of these replies, one should conduct surveys of English speakers (both native and nonnative) or analyze the occurrences in sufficiently large corpora of spoken language. Nevertheless, analyzing the propagation of this type of phraseme and its use in internet memes complements some previous findings regarding this aspect of phraseology.
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