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See, Schlock is regenerating and he's lost all his memories and has the mentality of about a six-year-old and ... Well, it's complicated.
Any of a variety of speech patterns used to indicate that a character, while intelligent, is perhaps too young, too inexperienced and/or insufficiently educated (or simply talks too fast) to properly express the complex ideas and thoughts that they clearly possess. One of the most obvious elements is a lack of relevant vocabulary, leading to both unconventional adjectival-noun structures like "shooty-gun thing", and incomplete, foundering similes that turn back on themselves in frustration: "That idea went over like... like... like a thing that doesn't go over very well." Metaphorgotten is frequently a side effect. Often includes Oh God, With The Troping! or similar.
Buffy Speak frequently combines these with idiosyncratic syntax and slang-like constructions that result in a distinct "flavor" to the character's speech. One of the more notable oddities is the use of definite articles with object nouns that do not normally take them (for example, "He does not inspire the trust"). In its most common manifestations it is a more intellectual descendant of Valley Speak, and bears some resemblance to the Southern Californese spoken by characters in the movie Clueless.
When properly handled, Buffy Speak can give the sense of a teenaged group's special jargon or argot without necessarily imitating anything actually found in the real world. Improperly handled, it can sound ludicrously fake and may damage Willing Suspension Of Disbelief.
Named for the distinctive speech patterns of the teenage characters in Buffy The Vampire Slayer — particularly its title character — who while sounding nothing like any teenager this editor has ever met or been, still somehow managed to sound like real teenagers. Buffy producer David Fury once noted that the characters "sound like Joss talks."
Contrast with Totally Radical. Compare I Pulled A Weird Al. See also Shaped Like Itself.
Examples
Anime
- In the Yu Yu Hakusho dub, on the way to Sensui's hideout, Yuusuke ask Kurama what the seeds he's spreading around are for, and our favourite red-haired Bishounen goes into an explanation about lighting their way, trailing off into phosphorus and bread crumbs. In that case, it sounded more like Kurama (who is a Really Seven Hundred Years Old Chessmaster and former White Haired Pretty) was trying to Buffy-Speak so that Yusuke would understand him.
Comic Books
Film
- Ratatouille's Linguini, tired of the hairionette treatment, tells Rémy: "I am not your puppet! And you are not my puppet... controller... guy!"
- Valentine from Mirrormask: "I will slip unnoticeable through the darkness like a dark, unnoticeable slippy thing," "We will do what rich people do! We will bathe in... fish!"
- In the 2007 TMNT movie, Raphael says "This thing about you immortal stone guys is...you know you're immortal...and made of stone. I sound like Mikey!"
- Men In Black also had this little exchange.
Kay: When you grow up.
- The titular character of Juno has a most idiosyncratic syntax.
- In Help!, George Harrison realizes that the curling stone he just threw is actually a bomb, and exclaims, "Hey, it's a thingy! A fiendish thingy!"
- The Derek Zoolander Center For Kids Who Can't Read Good And Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too.
Literature
- Even The X Queen has an example:
Izzi: I felt like...like...like I needed a good simile to describe this feeling.
- Pops up occasionally in Discworld, of all places. There was something similar to "Its eyes were as big as very big eyes".
- Pratchett really likes these "what's-that-thing" quips. Sourcery has a couple ("What's that thing that's mostly underwater?" "Crocodile?" "Hippopotamus? "Ocean?")
- "What's dat fing? Dey goes all crumbly when you eat dem?" "...could be a lawyer." "Dey goes soggy if you dips them in somefing?" "More likely to be a biscuit, then?" (Some trolls have the full "intelligent but cannot properly express ideas" Buffy Speak trope, though others... don't.)
- "I've got a really big...wossname. Thing with words in it." "Dictionary?" "Close enough."
- This troper knows he didn't get that quote verbatim, but does not have a copy to hand to consult.
- "The thing that went 'parp' went parp."
- The Georgia Nicholson books often refer to "snognosity". Not classic Buffy Speak, but definitely related.
- Gee also says, "as mad as two very mad things," etc.
- From Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens:
Crowley: Suspicion will slide off of him like, like...whatever it is water slides off of.
- And later in the conversation, something along the lines of:
"'A duck!' Crowley exclaimed. 'What are you talking about?' Aziraphale asked. 'A duck is what water slides off of!'"
- This troper could swear Pratchett talks about water sliding off ducks in at least one Discworld book, too.
- From Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere:
"He abused my hospitality," booomed the earl. "I swore that if he ever again entered my domain I would have him gutted and dried like, like something that had been gutted"
- Bertie Wooster (in both books and film/TV adaptations) frequently finds himself in the middle of an aphorism he can't complete without Jeeves' help. (The books are almost always narrated by Bertie but with a brilliant, effortless prose that a goof like Bertie would never be able to manage in real life and yet nonetheless seems plausible while you're reading it.)
Live Action TV
- Obviously, Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Interestingly, it's never referred to as "Buffy-speak" in the show, but in "I Only Have Eyes For You," Giles refers to it as "Xander-Speak".
- In "Innocence" (episode 2.14), we have this example from Willow:
No, Xander's right! My God, you people are all... well, I'm upset and I can't think of a mean word right now, but that's what you are!
- Played with in the new Doctor Who's second-season episode "School Reunion," where a villain calls K-9 a "Shooty Dog-thing", made more amusing by the villain in question being played by Buffy veteran Anthony "Giles" Head.
- Also, in "Blink":
- This might be a nod to the Machine That Goes "Ping!" from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.
- Blackadder the Third used this once to good effect, since the Blackadders are known for their razor-sharp wits, and because even without a decent metaphor, he still says it with confidence. As he says to Prince George regarding the causes of a threatened peasant revolution, "Disease and deprivation stalk our land like two giant stalking things."
- Also, Melchett in Blackadder II: "You twist and turn like a... twisty, turny thing!".
- Blackadder again, in II: "The grave opens before me like... a big hole in the ground."
- A guy buying flowers at the 2008 RHS Chelsea Flower Show.
BBC Presenter: What have you got there?
Guy: I've got a pink fluffy-thing, and a red flowery-thing.
- A variation in Firefly: Jayne, talking about Saffron, warns Simon & River "She'll turn you in faster than you can say... 'Don't turn me in, lady'."
- Derrick in Strangers With Candy, running out of insults for the new blind student: "Well, if it isn't Mr... no... looking at things... guy."
- Lost:
- In the pilot episode of Farscape astronaut John Crichton gets hold of his first raygun. After accidentally letting off a few shots he decides to try threats instead.
"Don't move, or I'll fill you full of... little yellow bolts of light!"
- Red Dwarf, where the characters, knowing nothing about astrogation or the area of space they are traveling through, often use terms like "Swirly-thing alert!"
- Or, on occasion, a "wibbly thing".
- Though, once, Arnold Rimmer described somebody as "a total, total ... A word has yet to be invented to describe how totally whatever-it-is you are, but you are one. And a total, total one at that."
- In Merlin, the title character describes a sword as "very... swordy".
Music
- They Might Be Giants have a song called "They'll Need a Crane" consisting almost entirely of this sort of thing.
- Barenaked Ladies have "There's a Word For That" in which they lament not knowing the proper word to describe a certain thingy that's right on the tip of their tongue.
- In O'Malley's Bar, Nick Cave sings about killing one of his victims "with an ashtray big as a really fucking big brick."
Real Life
- This troper's own girlfriend talks like this on many occasions, and is always cute when she does it...personal proof to him, at least, that it has already legitimately entered, at least on some level, into the public lexicon.
- This troper suffers from dysnomia, which "is a difficulty or inability to retrieve the correct word from memory when it is needed." (From The Other Wiki) Quite often, when a word cannot be retrieved, people with dysnomia will start trying to describe the word they're meaning but can't recall. In the case of this troper and a few other dysnomics of her acquaintance, this coping mechanism often begins to sound suspiciously like this troper has been watching a Buffy marathon. Examples include saying "that green-bottle-drink stuff" when wanting a Sprite or asking if it's ok to "turn on the overhead spinny-thingy" when needed to turn on the ceiling fan.
- This troper suffered from that temporarily after a severe overdose (3500 mg) of Doxepin.
- In a way, kennings are a form of this. One of the more famous ones, [[Beowulf]], translated as bee-wolf, is an Old English kenning for bear.
Video Games
- Right before inadvertently causing the destruction of his home universe, Zetta, main character of Makai Kingdom, exclaims, "Sacred Tome? Ha! More like... sucky... dumb... thing!" It's the first of many indications that, Overlord or not, he's not the sharpest tool in the shed.
- Armed and Dangerous, an obscure but fun shooter for the X-Box, had this...like...a lot. Perhaps the worst offender is the Emperor's retarded son, and I mean actually retarded, who has trouble stringing syllables together. Don't get him started on whole sentences.
- The Scout in Team Fortress 2 has a bunch of lines of the kind he occasionnaly says to his opponents. For exemple, to the Weapons Guy
 : "I am OWNING you, you fat bald fatty fat...fat-fat!" or to the Sniper: "You'll never hit me! You'll never hit my tiny head! It's so tiny, I've got a frickin'... such a tiny little head!". Fits well with the fact he's the youngest of the group.
- Travis from Silent Hill Origins, getting more and more peeved about being dragged around Silent Hill by Alessa, holds up a piece of the Flauros he found and yells out: "I got your...your thing for you!"
Web Animation
- Strong Bad from Homestar Runner: "My internet's crawling along like... something... funny... that crawls along."
- Also Reynold from the Cheat Commandos: "I never get to go on any missions! I'd be a good mission...guy."
- The Demented Cartoon Movie has "Evil Blah's Evil Lair Type House Thing!", inside of which are the "Evil device thingy!" the generic damsel is chained to and the "Weird evil Machine thing o` doom".
Web Comics
- Due to being Raised By Wolves, Red from Gunnerkrigg Court lapses into this when describing esoteric concepts like rooms and chairs. "Sitty-downy things," indeed.
- This is implied to be a function of serious gaps inherent in the education process prior to becoming human, because while chairs are a foreign concept she jabbers off about some seriously advanced nonsense.
- Eddie from Emergency Exit has a particularly amusing (especially if you haven't read the story) example here.
- Saya also uses this trope on this page while referring to the previous example.
- In this strip of Loserz: "You'll be defeated like... like... like... like some easily defeated thing!"
- Scary Go Round pretty much does this all the time, especially Shelley.
- Example:
Amy: "I think it's a vampire! Stab it with a stake!"
Shelley: "We can't do murders on it!"
- Another, laced with sarcasm:
Amy: I've not been this surprised since I discovered...something desperately unsurprising.
- Mab's gut feeling in Dan And Mabs Furry Adventures.
- Parodied in the "Muffin the Vampire Baker" story of Sluggy Freelance. "I'm going to do my best to distortify the English languagism thingies."
- Antihero For Hire
Dechs: You want to catch me, like the spider caught the fly, huh? Well now the spider has become the spided!
- At one point in Goblins, huge lizard-man K'Seliss says, "...There is battle happening right now all around me and I'm stuck in this pathetic hut like some... hut... stucky... thing!
- Fighter's true power:
Red Mage: We'd be better off using harsh language than the pathetic wooden pieces of... pathetic... weapons that these people call... weapons.
Black Mage: Um...
Red Mage: Shut up. I've been hanging out with Fighter all day. I could literally feel him sucking away at my... brain-thinky score thing.
Black Mage: You mean intelligence?
Red Mage: By Mordekainen's +5/+5 wand of sorcery, he's lowered my INT score just by being near me!
- Adventurers! gets some mileage out of this.
- Kris Straub's comics use this. In Starslip Crisis, sometimes this is future slang, and sometimes it's just "Fooly-fools!"
- Wonderella and her sidekick Wonderita.
- In You Damn Kid!, the narrator's parents get into an argument because Dad is looking for "the thing for cutting the things" and is angry that Mother doesn't know what he's talking about. "Imagine your parents not speaking for two weeks because Dad can't remember the words for 'toenail clipper'."
Western Animation
- In one episode of The Simpsons, Principal Skinner is searching for Bart, who cut school on the same day of an accident in the Quimby mansion. Bart escapes across a rope bridge and cuts it, thinking that Skinner won't walk into the raging river that separates the two. In Terminator-like fashion, Skinner walks under the water, barely changing his facial expression, at which point Bart quips, "He's like some sort of...non...giving up...school guy!"
- Also:
Homer: "Marge, where's that... metal dealy... you use to... dig... food...?"
Marge: "You mean a spoon?"
Homer: "Yeah, yeah!"
- Also also:
Homer: "Oh Lisa, you and your stories! Bart is a vampire! Beer kills brain cells! Now let's go back to that...building...thingy...where our beds and TV...is."
- Also also also:
Nelson: "Way to breathe, no-breath."
- And:
Lionel Hutz: "I move for a bad court-thingy."
Judge Snyder: "You mean a mistrial?
Hutz: "Yeah! That's why you're the judge, and I'm the...law-talking-guy."
- Homer, upon meeting the editor of Reader's Digest:
"I especially love the Build Your Vocabulary section! That thing is really, really, really... good."
- In an episode of Rockos Modern Life, Rocko gets angry at his broken old vacuum cleaner: "You're useless and pathetic, like a useless and pathetic thing!"
- Futurama. "But Bender need brain! For smart-making!"
Leela: "Oh no! He's siphoning our energy and becoming stronger!"
Fry: "Like a balloon and... something bad happens!"
- Or alternatively...
Fry: "Hey, wait! I'm having one of those things! You know, a headache with pictures."
Leela: "An idea?"
Fry: (gesturing madly) "Mmm! Mm!"
- Invader Zim. As in, every single character. This includes Zim ("I might as well make your entire brain... nn-not smart no more."), The Almighty Tallest ("Our big... space ship... gang!"), and Dib ("Score nothing for the Zim... thingy... race."), to name a few.
- Rescue Rangers: In the episode "Gadget Goes Hawaiian," Lawhinie (Gadget's Evil Twin / Evil Counterpart) can't remember the names of Gadget's tools when disguised as the Ranger.
- Suki, in the Avatar the Last Airbender finale, with "King of... the guys... who... don't win?"
- Both of The Angry Beavers used the word "thingy" repeatedly. One of the episodes is actually titled "Big Round Sticky Fish Thingy".
Daggett: "Desperate times call for desperate desperate-ness...!"
- Storm Hawks, while Junko is potrayed as quite smart for his species, he's not quite a genius. "The Beacon! It's stopped... beaconing!"
- Junko mentions that as a child, he was picked on for being more intellectual than your average Wallop; he's the only Wallop that plays a major role in the series, though, so we really have no baseline for where your average Wallop falls on the scale of thinking versus hitting things.
- Monique Speak in Kim Possible, as well as slang outside of the show's trope namer.
- Earthworm Jim had some of this. For example, in one episode Jim takes a Doppelganger -creating gun and Evil Jim says "Give that back you... Thing-taker guy!"
- In Dave The Barbarian, Dark Lord Chuckles the Silly Piggy taunted Dave with, "You shall perish beneath the might of my...mighty...mightiness!"
- Skeeter's father in Doug initially suffers from this because the room is so noisy he can't hear himself think. Later he's Flanderized into doing this all the time.
- Frisky Dingo — "And I would not call that making love. I would call that... the Shame Spear... of... Hurt..."
Other
- There's a snowclone joke out there that goes, "There's only two kinds of people in this world: Those who are good with words, and those who are... umm... uh... Thingy."
- I feel in my gut that Colbert's clever Neologism Truthiness is Buffy Speak at its finest.
- The German words for (a set of) drums and plane literally translates into "Hit thing" and "Flying Thing", respectively.
- And the words for lighter and toy translates into "Fire Thing" and "Play Thing"... yeah.
- Comic actor Steve Martin's stand-up routines frequently employ this trope.
- "Because a day without sunshine is like, you know, night."
- "Some people have a way with words... and some people... not have way. I guess."
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