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

Does anyone ever convert from the dreamer reading to the exceller reading? Conversions in the other direction seem somewhat common (me for one - I hear the dream reading as more natural now), but it seems like dreamers are typically entrenched.

It's a bit annoying, I guess, but it could be taken as a datum in favour of the dreamer reading. If the only way for the exceller reading to take hold is to have involuntarily heard it that way from the beginning, then there's something flukey about the reading.

Oh oh
Dreeeeeamreader
I believe you can get me through the threaaad

Anyone even trying to convert tho?

wow this thread. i guess this is probably the one simpsons topic i've never weighed in on here so here goes.

here's the full exchange:

ralph: miss hoover?
miss hoover: yes, ralph?
ralph: my worm went in my mouth, and then i ate it. can i have a new one?
miss hoover: there aren't any more, ralph. just try to sleep while the other children are learning.
ralph: oh boy, sleep! that's where i'm a viking!

from the way it's written and delivered, this exchange seems to be leading up to ralph saying something like "oh boy, sleep! that's something i'm good at!" which is the kind of lame sitcom line that most shows would have given us. of course, ralph wouldn't have said that because he doesn't really have the self-awareness required to describe himself as being good at something. but i think this is where the confused "wait...does being a 'viking' mean that you're good at stuff?" interpretation comes from. and of course ralph wouldn't have said that either, even if it made any sense, because he never uses metaphors. so, yes, he's talking about a dream. the joke is a little confusing but it's in character for ralph to describe everything with baffling literalness.

what's always kinda weirded me out in this scene is that the kids are dissecting LIVE worms, that they're supposed to pin down. was that really a thing? the only thing i ever dissected in class was a clam. (also, if the worm ralph ate had been dead, presumably it would have been treated with formaldehyde and miss hoover should have called 911 instead of just telling him to go to sleep.)

Yeah, it's actually what annoys me about the argument that the 'excels' reading is more creative or fun - it's the more simplistic, predictable joke. It's only less 'literal' because it requires you to strain the actual line to fit the conditioned expectation.

"Sleeping - now that's where I'm a champ!" That's some Michael Kelso shit.

from the way it's written and delivered, this exchange seems to be leading up to ralph saying something like "oh boy, sleep! that's something i'm good at!

I think this is also debatable, largely because Ralph is blankly enthusiastic about everything except for the episode where Lisa crushes his spirit; it reads to me like Ralph is excited about getting to go to sleep because he gets excited about everything and I have no belief that he has an inner monologue capable of sorting things he does into "I'm good at this" or "I'm bad at this" taxonomies.

what's always kinda weirded me out in this scene is that the kids are dissecting LIVE worms, that they're supposed to pin down. was that really a thing?

Yes. Admittedly not in second grade, but worm dissection is, or at least used to be, a common high school biology activity.

We dissected worms in high school (or maybe Grade 8?) But they were dead and preserved in formaldehyde.

Not gonna try to load this entire thread to find out but does anyone know if Nancy Cartwright has weighed in? The writer's intent seems irrelevant in this situation where we all first experienced the joke through Cartwright's delivery. It's pretty easy to change the meaning of a sentence just by shifting the emphasis.

I think the worms we dissected were live; the frogs were preserved. I have a memory of trying to pin the worm's head while it was squirming.

What word would you have to emphasize to cause "viking" to mean "excel at" for the first time in the history of the english language? xp

Appreciate JD posting the full exchange because yeah that's gotta be why so many ppl made the "excels at" instantaneous interpretation; they were primed for it.

xp
If I had the answer to that I'd be a famous voiceover artist.

Tho obv I think humor comes from Ralph immediately forgetting what he was doing and being happy to go to dreamland

It's also clear *from that exchange* that Ralph doesn't have the conception of having been "bad at" something - he's not embarrassed to have eaten his worm and seems to think that was a normal thing to do. I appreciate JD's generosity but it's a silly reading.

this is some blue dress shit and it's wrecking my brain

It's weird because he emphasizes several words equally. It sounds to me like:

"Oh boy, SLEEP. THAT'S where I'M a VIKING."

If 'That's' were clearly the dominant emphasis then you'd get something like "I may not have been a viking at dissecting worms but I'm a viking at THAT." As it is, you can sort of see why people hear it differently.

Blue dress was some interesting sensory-perceptual boundary stuff - not often that I and my wife can look at the same thing on the same screen and see radically different colours. This is just an argument about the meaning of a text, which happens every day in English classes across the anglosphere, just a trivial one.

I just listened to the clip and he does not emphasize "that's"

more Red Dress than blue and black dress

This is just an argument about the meaning of a text, which happens every day in English classes across the anglosphere, just a trivial one.

For sure! Except most texts can have multiple meanings. This one, it's obvious to anyone what Ralph means.

Yeah the "thats" is not emphasised and therefore absolutely not

from the way it's written and delivered, this exchange seems to be leading up to ralph saying something like "oh boy, sleep! that's something i'm good at!

I don't hear (or read) it that way; for me it seems to be leading up to ralph saying something like "oh boy, sleep! that's something i'm good at! I enjoy."

Does he enjoy it because he believes he excels at it? Perhaps he looks forward to sleep merely because it's something he knows how to do. It's low-pressure. He's adequate at sleeping. And he's not adequate at much else.

He could also (and this is how Team Dream interprets the line) look forward to sleep because he has a rich fantasy life in his dreams, where he can be free. Given how constrained his everyday world is, this makes a lot of sense.

Both interpretations stem from Ralph's gleeful anticipation of oblivion. But - I think this is key to his character - his outlook is generally pretty sunny. Would that we could all be configured so simply that a half-hour on a nap mat constitutes a welcome adventure.

Id hear it as Ralph simply being not just absurdly easily distracted, but delighting in that distraction

I have no belief that he has an inner monologue capable of sorting things he does into "I'm good at this" or "I'm bad at this" taxonomies.

"Me fail English? That's unpossible!" would seem to confirm this.

Does he enjoy it because he believes he excels at it? Perhaps he looks forward to sleep merely because it's something he knows how to do. It's low-pressure. He's adequate at sleeping. And he's not adequate at much else.

He might do, but he would not convey that notion by using the words 'that's where I'm a viking'.

I don’t remember who brought up the line from WHAS about being “late for shul” and thinking that it was a weird mispronunciation of “school”, and finding it funny, but I think it was a good comparison. I also thought that initially, and, like whoever said this before, I also recalibrated once I realized what the real joke was. And now, maybe there’s another world with another movie in which a character might mispronounce “school” and I’d find it funny. But I can’t possibly take the WHAS line in that way anymore, now that I know what the actual intent was!

And it was funnier as a weird mispronunciation! But, c’est la vie.

"I don't care that you're bilingual" shortly after is the real chortle for me

Does anyone ever convert from the dreamer reading to the exceller reading? Conversions in the other direction seem somewhat common (me for one - I hear the dream reading as more natural now), but it seems like dreamers are typically entrenched.

It seems to me that the Simpsons accidentally created a memorable phrase that's very easily twisted from its original meaning, because its original meaning is almost wholly based on context. If you watch the Simpsons, you know who Ralph is, and you have the whole line and its context in front of you, then the most reasonable explanation for it is that Ralph dreams he's a Viking.

But if you get rid of any part of that context - who Ralph is, his mental capacity, the fact that Ralph is talking about sleep specifically - then "I'm a viking" sounds like it ought to mean "I'm good at." Not because "being a viking" actually = "being skilled" anywhere else in English usage, but because it sounds close enough to other phrases meaning "to be good at" or "to be bad at" that our brains instinctively make that leap.

So there's a high-context meaning to the phrase and a low-context meaning, and as we move farther away from the original context for the line, my guess is that the second meaning is going to seem more and more like the intuitive "right" meaning.

it’s like the tonic of “sweet home Alabama”, or Stewart copelad’s fucked up chords!

my thoughts on the use of the word "viking" follow, and don't really have anything to do with the og intent of the writers or anybody's take in this thread, but still:

to be a "viking" at some activity wouldn't just mean you excelled at it in isolation, like knitting in general (stacy really vikinged that puppy sweater), imo it implies a competitive realm in which you totally destroy all opposition, like the all-world knitting championship series (stacy really vikinged the belgian contestant so hard in the finals that the belgian didn't even show up for the medal ceremony).

otoh, if you are a literal viking, imo it suggests you have transcended trivial interpersonal comparisons over what you are and aren't good at, or how that positions you socially, because you are a viking and dgaf. you just have to be good at one thing, vikinging. if you are just a mediocre coder or can't play the net, does it matter? no, because what you do all day is crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women. if ppl are worried about dying at your hands they're not throwing shade because of whatever stupid thing they think makes them special and not you.

this is why dream resonates more with me than excel. ralph isn't jazzed that he's the best at sleep, he perks up because gets to be someone who doesn't care about who he has to be the rest of the time. that seems really dark, though, so maybe my vote is that the viking comment was just a silly non-sequitor that wasn't supposed to mean anything specifically.

I think he is saying he excels at sleep because he has dreams of being a Viking, whereas other people have dreams about less excellent things, or don't have positive sleep experiences.

Thinking that Ralph discusses his dreams with the rest of the kids, or at least that they tell him what they dream, doesn't seem likely. Nobody speaks to him, hence why he thinks Lisa is his girlfriend just because she isn't ignoring him.

I haven't seen this show in like over 20 years and even then, I watched episodes here and there, so ... unless we are completely divorcing the argument from the context of the show, I am probably the least likely to be right in my interpretation.

though speaking of shows that I am very familiar with -- The Wire -- notice, in this clip, the presence of "sleep" and the announcement of "being a viking" -- is this a reference to Ralph's Viking-ness?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ph3ESERrdMU

I think I was in the "excel" camp because (and I'm sure someone has already said this in the previous 2000 posts) I misremembered the scene and thought there was an emphasis on "I'm". In my head all these years it's been "that's where *I'm* a viking", but it turns out that there is no such inflection, and what I've had in my head is just informed by the later "excel" reading. So now I'm a dream-excel hybrid.

the really fun thing about Granny's determined, viking-like rampage to stomp Doctor Casino into the permafrost on the principle of authorial intent is that Josh Weinstein did not write the line, and therefore has no more authority than the other writer in the room who tweeted that he thought it meant Ralph excels at sleeping.

Krusty also doesn't say "sex cauldron" as loud as you remember

Weinstein wasn't even in the room, for that matter (and in the 2021 round of tweeting about it specifically says people should be able to laugh at whatever they find funny).

oh boy, Facebook, that's where I'm a-liking
Oh boy, the public square, that's where I'm a-piking
oh boy, the football pitch, that's where I'm a-striking

Weinstein said he deferred to David Mirkin, who said this but did not explicitly say that he was the original writer or that he knew who was:

Simple: Ralph dreams he's a Viking. Ralph was never written with the ability to understand a complex & obscure metaphor like saying he is a Viking at something, meaning he is great at it. If I knew Scully had misunderstood a joke like that, I would have fired him instantly.

— David Mirkin (@DaveMirkin) December 21, 2020

I dunno, I kinda like the idea that Ralph would display this unexpected metaphorical idiosyncrasy when presented with an activity that he actually feels confident in.

Even granting that, I don't really see the metaphor as "complex & obscure" as much as "kind of dumb". Maybe if it was something like "that's where I'm a Pythagoras/Galileo", I could see it working in the context of a science class failure.

sic it's funny you think the "real writer" would say anything different than what Weinstein and Mirkin have. But yes shame on me for not investigating further, boy do i have egg on my face.

jesus christ you people are still talking about this

Guinness record within reach

New board description xp

Maybe when we ask why the chicken crossed the road we mean the chicken tricked or hoodwinked the road