Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

21 Feb 2003, 18:45 p.m.

Sumana Suggests Signifiers

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2003 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

I should distinguish between the signifiers "woooOOOOooo" and "doodley-oodley-oodley".

  • "wooOOOooo" tells the audience, "this is a scary story; feel scared." For my purposes, "woooOOOOooo" is appropriate for supernatural tales even when the story is not really scary.
  • "Doodley-oodley-oodley" is the "wacky! irony!" sound between a sitcom character's statement "X will never happen" and the occurrence of X. (See Punchline Prima Facie, "wipe transition" paragraph in the 18 Sept 2002 critique.)
Also, once a character notices the circumstances that would produce either of those sounds, he may say, "X Sense... Tingling!"

I am so extremely boring.