The throwaway line “Oh, boy, sleep! That’s where I’m a viking!” uttered by the character Ralph Wiggum in The Simpsons has caused unholy debate on the internet lately.
Does he mean, or perhaps more specifically what did The Simpsons’ writers intend the meaning to be?
A) That he has an enjoyable recurring dream in which he is a Scandinavian warrior.
or
B) That he excels at sleeping.
The debate on this topic at Metafilter outshines all others out there. Especially the following comment posted by fleetmouse.
English is a flexible, nimble, shifting-pathogen language and is more than able to absorb that slight stretch of a figure of speech
Yes, exactly – which is why people are arguing about this in the first place – we’re used to this goddamn inexterminable cockroach of a language having umpteen layers of literal and figurative meaning.
God, I love the Frankenstein’s monster that is English. Sewn together out of dead languages and living ones that it kills and uses for spare parts. If the human race were exterminated, English would find a new host or wait for one to evolve. English does not sleep. It waits.
I love this metaphor for the English language.
