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"I Shit My Pants":
Spontaneous Ancient Literary Structure in Modern Colloquial Speech

by Clark Cooley, Ph.DL.DD.

Part III: The Text

Below is the transcript of our primary source, a voicemail originating from a native English speaker (dialect: Michigan), recorded September, 2004:

01:   Hey
02:   If you called me back, I missed it.
 
03:   I was at the grocery store.
04:   Where I just shit my pants.
05:   I SHIT MY PANTS!
06:   At the grocery store.
 
07:   [Laughs]
 
08:   Yeah!
 
09:   I didn't even take my cart back to the Cart Corral.
 
10:   [Laughs]
 
11:   And then I told this lady, I said "What? I shit my pants!"
12:   And she didn't even ASK me.
 
13:   She was ... looking at me like i was insane.
 
14:   'Cos I think I might be. I don't know.
 
15:   Is that crazy?
 
16:   Alright. Bye.

On the face of it (discounting, perhaps, the subject matter), there would seem to be nothing out of the ordinary about this voicemail. It seems to be a rather typical sample of current vernacular U.S. English language speech.

Careful analysis, however, reveals something more.

(Proceed to Chiasmus)


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