I recently had to do a recording of my friends speaking informally for a sociolinguistics project. When I typed out the transcript and showed it to my group members, they didn’t believe that the conversation actually transpired as I related it to them. I have this feeling in my gut that it’s got something to do with how one of the participants is a particularly strange friend of mine, who finds it perfectly normal to say statements like the following:

I don’t get turned on by tigers. I just find them sexy. And if i had to choose between at 80 year old man and a tiger, i’d choose the tiger!

She also has a big problem with remembering nursery rhymes and which animated motion pictures certain Disney songs are from. (Actually, she just doesn’t know anything about Disney movies.) As far as she’s concerned, Kiss The Girl doesn’t exist in The Little Mermaid, the 7 dwarves’s song (the one that goes, “hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go”) didn’t come from Snow White - but she can’t remember where it’s from, When You Wish Upon A Star came from Sleeping Beauty, there were no horses in Cinderella, and Mowgli (from The Jungle Book) was actually a monkey who turned into a human being after getting chased by a lion.

(We later found out that she’s never watched any of the abovementioned films - she got her songs from a McDonald’s Disney Favourites CD.)

As if that’s not enough, she was trying to remember where the Fee Fi Fo Fum rhyme came from, decided it was the wolf from Little Red Riding Hood who said it, then changed her mind and said it was, “the wolf from the three blind mi… No wait. It wasn’t the Three Blind Mice. It was.. wait. What was it? The spiders? The rats? The.. I KNOW I KNOW! It was the pigs! How many were there ah? 5 is it?”

With friends like these a friend like this, you really don’t need TV or any other source of entertainment.