Jokes and covert language attitudes
The Curious Case of the Wide-Mouth Frog
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7900948 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Alan Dundes (University of California, Berkeley, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1977 |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 141-147 |
| Publication date | 1977-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Language in Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0047-4045 • E-ISSN: 1469-8013 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0047404500007223 |
| OpenAlex | W2123792465 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 3 |
In the early 1970s, a strange piece of whimsy circulated orally in the United States. The modern joke in question concerned a ‘wide-mouth’ frog who evidently lacked the knowledge of what to feed its newborn babies. In the course of his or her attempts to question other animals about their normal regimes of infant diet, the wide-mouth frog is eventually put in the position of having to radically alter its customary speech pattern. This piece of folklore thus contains an explicitly metalinguistic aspect. Let me present representative texts of the story before discussing its possible significance
Art · Covert · Folklore · Joke · Linguistics · Literature · Communication · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Philosophy · Psychology · Themes in Literature Analysis
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,1 |
| Citation span | 1986 - 2024 (39) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |