Okay, is there a searchable TV / movies corpus?

[conuly]

Or several corpuses? (Corpora?)

I’m just getting tired of people claiming that “nobody” says things that I’m certain I’ve recently heard on contemporary lowbrow media. But I just can’t prove it! And I can’t make them prove it either!

Even fansites with searchable scripts would be something.

Comments

[sixbeforelunch]

http://chakoteya.net has some Star Trek, Andromeda, Doctor Who, and an assortment of related things.

[conuly]

Thankies!

[nocowardsoul]

Subslikescript.com

[conuly]

Thankies!

[lilly_c]

I’ve used https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/ and https://transcripts.foreverdreaming.org/ when I’ve needed to look things up. Forever dreaming have started writing words like murder as m*rder which is bad for screenreader users like me, other than that gripe they have loads.

[conuly]

Thankies!

[lilly_c]

There's also TV Writing which has PDFs of quite a few shooting scripts https://sites.google.com/site/tvwriting/home

[magid]

I think the plural of corpus should be corpi….?

[conuly]

No, that's the plural marker for the second declension.

The Latin word "corpus, corporis" is in the third declension. You can tell because of the related English word "corporal" which retains the or we pick up in the genitive.

[sovay]

Or several corpuses? (Corpora?)

I'd say corpora whether anyone does in English or not.

(What are people not supposed to be saying on contemporary TV?)

[conuly]

"I didn't get a wink of sleep" and variations thereof; there are multiple people claiming to be native speakers who have never, ever, ever heard this phrase.

I ended up here, here, and on a Pokemon wiki, and I feel confident in saying that a phrase that shows up this century in shows as diverse and contemporary as NCIS, The Simpsons, RuPaul's Drag Race, Brooklyn 99, Parks and Recreation, The Sopranos, Grimm, and yes, Pokemon is widespread and they probably have heard it.

Edit: Also Young Sheldon, Jane the Virgin, Gossip Girl, Suits, Angel, Charmed, and Bridgerton. Not sure if I should include the last, as it's a period piece, but people have certainly watched it!

Though oddly, it doesn't occur in Friends. Apparently, in ten seasons, the word "sleep" doesn't appear at all. I had to find a PDF of all episodes to track that little tidbit down. (And as I emphasized to everybody at reddit, these are fan-run sites and fan-submitted transcripts, it's unpaid labor, there's no way this is a wholly comprehensive list of scripts.)

[sovay]

a phrase that shows up this century in shows as diverse and contemporary as NCIS, The Simpsons, RuPaul's Drag Race, Brooklyn 99, Parks and Recreation, Grimm, and yes, Pokemon is widespread

Sounds like it to me.

Edit: Also Young Sheldon, Jane the Virgin, Gossip Girl, Suits, Angel, Charmed, and Bridgerton. Not sure if I should include the last, as it's a period piece, but people have certainly watched it!

I would include Bridgerton because it's not as though it's actually more faithful to the language conventions of the early nineteenth century than the twentieth.

I can believe there are people in this world who have never heard the phrase "a wink of sleep," but that is rather insufficient evidence on which to claim it has cease to exist in the language.

[conuly]

This is the same subreddit in which the weekly autopost brings up "pork burgers" and, reliably, at least once a month gets a reply saying that pork burgers don't exist and they're really talking about: pulled pork sandwiches, breakfast sausage sandwiches, or in one case, ham sandwiches.

And for that matter, the poster uses "learnt" in their post title and a couple of people in the comments (literally two) are going "that's not a word". They could've taken half a second to google it first, or even to type it into their reply box and see if it got redlined, but of course they never do.

Lots of people seem to think that if they personally don't know of a thing, it doesn't exist.

[zavodilaterrarium]

It's so annoying to see it everywhere once you realise it's a problem! Been doing my best to not indulge in such ignorances, but it's seriously culturally ingrained... One time, a friend questioned my use of the word "outing" to mean going out/a trip since they'd never heard it used like that, which I thought was probably fair since they live in a different area/country. I explained it, and I thought that was it. But later, when I used it again in the same way, they acted like I was WEIRD for doing so, which annoyed me so I sent them links and screenshots proving that not only is this a perfectly normal use of the word, but something that people in our shared social groups have actively said.

[conuly]

And I bet when you sent those screenshots they were very normal and agreed that they were the one making things weird, not you… right?

[zavodilaterrarium]

I have to admit, I'm not sure what the tone of this is? Yes, my habit of providing more proof than necessary isn't the best and really shouldn't've bothered, but I feel that it really is weird to continuously question someone on what I believe to be an innocuous word choice — they weren't saying it was offensive or anything so it wasn't about that, just that "no one does that, why are you, it doesn't make sense", which is unnecessary to do multiple times after I already explained myself imo.

[conuly]

Making fun of the common habit of people who go out of their way to offer unwanted corrections and commentary, but when they’re shown they are wrong suddenly it’s all “you don’t always have to be right”.

Admittedly that joke doesn’t work if your friend was gracious about it or at least dropped the subject without further comments, but that’s still a good outcome.

[zavodilaterrarium]

At first I thought that's what you meant, but I accidentally worked myself up a bit at the idea that I didn't realise I went too far... Self-regulation is evidently not my strong suit, my bad.

My friend did seem to realise I wasn't particularly happy with the questioning, thankfully.

[sovay]

Lots of people seem to think that if they personally don't know of a thing, it doesn't exist.

That's exhausting.

(Today I learned that pork burgers are controversial.)

[conuly]

I genuinely don’t understand how they live like that.