Oh boy, ILX! That's where I'm a viking!..?

but Ralph looks sad throughout the whole sequence so he knows he fucked up

i meant for "a" to be correct (self x-post)

can't wait til this thread hits 300 replies

Holy shit this thread is the saddest display of wtfery I've seen here since the salt one.

AND I AM A SIMPSONS FAN. o_0

love all the dudes itt getting sanctimonious w/0 revealing their position

guys i think maybe Ralph is srsly an intelectual pretending to be stupid so he can win milhouse's heart......

hay i revealed mine already!!11!!!

if you think it's "sleep is an area in which he excels" then you clearly misunderstood it when it aired and now have to justify your inability to judge words by the context of the sentence in which they appear. stop being so stubborn.

Its "thats where i am dreaming and thus I can be a viking" ffs it was a simple, unadorned joke and I'm staggered this is even on the table.

ok i swore i wasn't going to get into this but lol @ the idea that ralph could come up with a fanciful and original metaphor such as "viking" being "something you are good at"

― call all destroyer, Tuesday, April 27, 2010 3:36 AM (5 hours ago)
ftr I totally don't get this argument, when has ralph ever been aware of the import of anything he says. he's totally the kid you teach solecisms to who'll never question the meaning of it and always use it. someone taught one of the chinese tutors at my last job that saying "I'm really horny!" was a cool & american way of saying "I'm really happy!" and he went around for a week telling people he was really horny before someone broke it to him.

so your counter argument is that we are to assume there's a backstory of someone teaching Ralph that viking=one who excels? that's the more logical to view it? occam's razor works well with comedy

Wow, never even heard of the "dreams he's a viking" version until tonight. Totally baffled and flummoxed by it... I mean I file this under the same as Marge declaring "Now it's Marge's time to shine!" except just using this weird idiom that's probably something one of Ralph's teachers have fed him when trying to encourage him to go to sleep.

a) lovin this thread; ii) amazed that this is a thing; 3) can see how in a moment of unguarded innocence someone might think that ralph means he excels at sleeping; cannot see how, on being told the dream explanation, they would not go 'OH my god OF COURSE that is so OBVIOUS!'

if you think it's "sleep is an area in which he excels" then you clearly misunderstood it when it aired and now have to justify your inability to judge words by the context of the sentence in which they appear. stop being so stubborn.

you're right, language is static and words never take on new meanings

I never take context into account when interpreting language!

I mean I file this under the same as Marge declaring "Now it's Marge's time to shine!"

OK wow now see that one's an obvious turn of phrase for "marge's time to be awesome" because ITS ALREADY A SAYING.

"I'm a viking" isnt a saying aaaaaa this is like the think/thing thread hahaha this is doing my head in.

http://www.bingegamer.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/lost-vikings.jpg

guys.

ralph means that sleep is literally where he becomes a viking

shit is simple

flummoxed by people connecting "sleep" + "a scenario that is not connected to reality" = dreaming? seriously? you are. flummoxed. you. right now. by that.

i do have to say that ILX seems way more in agreement on this than most places

Crut OTM.

Even the grammar doesn't work. That's WHERE I'm a viking. Not: I'm a viking at the task of sleeping. I'm the viking of sleep, you could say. When it comes to sleeping, it's safe to consider me to be at viking level.
vs
In the land of dreams, that's where it's like I'm an actual viking and being a viking is cool cause of the exploring and the cool helmets, I so can't wait to get back to sleep and do some pillaging.

me fail english, that's unpossible

yeah but it's not even fucked up enough grammar to be funny, just enough to make interpretation A implausible

this poll should be a question on civil service exams

it establishes that ralph is an unreliable narrator

has post-structuralism taught us NOTHING

Off to sleep for me, where I'm a Mayan at explaining jokes to fools

IMO: "sleep, thats where I'm a viking!" = "sleep, thats where I'm a fairy queen/merchant banker/cyborg destructor/[insert fantasy dreamstate of choice]"

Shouldn't option B say: Ralph means that sleep is where he dreams he is a viking? I mean obviously he doesn't literally become a viking when he's asleep (though if he does, maybe he dreams about being a boy).

the problem is，sleep doesn't necessarily imply dreaming

ralph a bit sketchy on the whole

http://intepid.com/res/417.gif

distinction

He might believe that he becomes a viking, but that doesn't mean that we should believe it.

"ralph means that sleep is literally where he becomes a viking" - that is what ralph means. what we believe is not important.

What's this salt thread Trayce is talking about?

I forget what the title was but people were arguig over wether it was polite to salt food before you ate it or not. It got hilariously heated.

Taste your food before you salt it, of course. Fuck politeness - too much salt leads to high.blood pressure.

Pepper on the other hand, I will dump like 5 packets of that on my french fries. It's like I hate the taste of french fries so much that it takes that much pepper to eat them. I would probably be better off pouring all that pepper on a salad or summat.

really is the most wtf thread i have encountered after nearly 8 years of ILXing

http://www.bb-shopping.com/prod_images/image_cat60/thumbs/300/thumb_3917_image1_homer_simpson_low.jpg

Well played.

As much as I am a b-ist on this one, the argument of using grammar with Ralph Wiggum is sort of not holding any weight

Man, had I known, I would've posed this to Simpsons writer/producer Mike Reiss when I met him briefly a couple months ago.

http://images.icanhascheezburger.com/completestore/2008/10/27/128696138717354358.jpg

the problem is，sleep doesn't necessarily imply dreaming

right, not necessarily. but when you talk about fantasy role playing...
not to be a dick but are you really this obtuse? find it hard to believe you're not trolling.

I mean I can definitely see where you B types are coming from but I just don't think it's as cut and dry as ya'll are making it out to be. state of sleep != dreaming first of all (I find it hard to conceive of sleep as a place, fantastical or otherwise) and second the phrase "that's where I'm (x)" is more ambiguous than ya'll are giving it credit for being. if ralph had said "that's where I become a viking" I admit we wouldn't be having this argument.

you people are blowing my mind.

like.

i did not think this was a real debate at first.

what a bunch of Ralphs

fwiw I was trained as a lit major in college and thus always look for the hermeneutic road less traveled and really cannot believe that people can get so dogmatically insistent over something as transient and mutable as language

(I've also believed in option A since first viewing this episode as a rerun on FOX in the mid 90s)