Word Salad is a concept meant to describe a "confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases". It gets used as a trope, but is actually a redirect to Talkative Loon, the people who say the word salad. As the idea of Word Salad is broader, this check will see if the usage is enough to make it a trope in its own right. Other usage (misuse, ZCE, etc) will also be checked for.
Wicks: 50/50
- Used as a unique trope: 36/50, or 72%
- Talkative Loon: 5/50, or 10%
- Misuse: 4/50, or 8%
- ZCE: 5/50, or 10%
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Used as a unique trope / unique concept
- Good Bad Translation: Some Gag Dubs have been created based on these. For example, Lutheran Satire remade their video "St. Patrick's Bad Analogies" as "St. Patrick's Bad Closed Captioning
" based on captions that rendered the original's "bad Irish accents and Trinitarian jargon" into near-Word Salad. - Munchkin: Munchkins try to hunt for "XP for roleplaying" by being overly dramatic, and heaven help you if the game uses Ritual Magic — everything will stop until the Word Salad cooked up by the Munchkin is resolved. Anything that gives more pluses will be used and abused to the nth degree.
- Random Events Plot: Any Dada Comic counts, but Listening to 11.975 MHz deserves a special mention for sheer incomprehensibility. The first few strips alone feature bizarrely-drawn characters spouting off Word Salad in several different languages, and Deco Blue's surreal adventures don't make any more sense than this.
- Terrible Ticking: In one of the short stories from Everything's Eventual, a maître d’hôtel flips out and starts killing people, while shrieking about a barking dog that only he can hear. Or possibly one that had barked at him once years ago. It's a little word salad-y.
- This Is Not a Floor: Shows up twice in Paprika, first from the outside, as a character rants about "the fifth grade class with the photographic zoom lens" and runs through a full-length window, then from the inside, with the main character snapping out of it just in time to avoid going over a balcony.
- Word Salad Lyrics: Two wicks in two examples:
- Ministry usually made lyrics from sampled speeches or relatively sane lyrics, but apparently had some Word Salad pent up in their system. The result of getting it all out was the staggeringly incomprehensible "Jesus Built My Hotrod". Mind you, the following is just the song's spoken-word intro.Soon I discovered that this rock thing was true. Jerry Lee Lewis was the devil. Jesus was an architect, previous to his career as a prophet. All of a sudden I found myself in love with the world, so there was only one thing that I could do: Was ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long...
- Animal Collective's Feels. All of it. They're all quirky love songs. Or end-of-relationship songs. This said, each individual song has, beyond the underlying premise, plenty of Word Salad and/or Mind Screw ("Word Parsley"?!) to go around. Which is true of most of their material, frankly.
- Ministry usually made lyrics from sampled speeches or relatively sane lyrics, but apparently had some Word Salad pent up in their system. The result of getting it all out was the staggeringly incomprehensible "Jesus Built My Hotrod". Mind you, the following is just the song's spoken-word intro.
- Angrish.Anime And Manga: In one chapter of Sgt. Frog, Keroro gets sick, and Tamama tries to visit him with gifts, hoping that by this point he's getting sick of "that dumb broad" (Angol Moa, whom he regards as a rival for the Sergeant's attention) trying to minister to him. Instead, he finds Moa is merely sitting quietly with Keroro at his bedside, upon which Moa politely asks Tamama to be quiet so Keroro can sleep. The flabbergasted Tamama simply babbles "My electrolytic quotient has been reduced to the laxity of damaged hair..."
- Characters.Daria: He and the other members of Mystik Spiral are intended to be horrible musicians. Though if you exclude the silly lyrics, "Freakin' Friends" is actually rather competentnote . Seems to be a trend with Trent; he's actually not a half-bad guitarist or singer, but his lyrics are pure Word Salad.
- Characters.Deltarune Spamton: You first encounter him as he hops out of a dumpster while trying to pitch you a "deal" in electronic Word Salad, showing a manic fascination for your "[HeartShapedObject]". During his pitch, he flips to lamenting about "LIVING IN A GODDAMN GARBAGE CAN" and promptly punches it in rage before going right back to deal-brokering like nothing happened. You've only met him for about a minute and he already shows himself as a shady salesman who's not all that there.
- Characters.The Arknverse Dekn: Delves into this when introducing himself to Toby Kestler (as seen in his character quote). In his case, it's merely repeating Toby's thoughts before he can vocalize them.
- Film.Alexander Nevsky: Scenes with the Teutonic Knights are accompanied by a sinister Latin chorus, which rises in a crescendo during the battle scene, to indicate that the Teutons were evil Catholics fighting the good-guy Russians. Prokofiev's scoring for this scene sounds similar enough to Carl Orff's Carmina Burana to have inspired, perhaps, the use of "O Fortuna" in subsequent movies. (The Orff piece was written earlier ―- by one year.) The chanted words "Peregrinus expectavi pedes meos in cymbalis" are themselves snipped from various places in Igor Stravinsky's A Symphony of Psalms, quite possibly as a subtle Take That! to his contemporary. Prokofiev evidently realized that practically no-one in the audience would know Latin: the assembled chant is Word Salad meaning something like "A pilgrim — I awaited — my feet — on the cymbals."
- Funny.Brainscratch Commentaries Video Game Commentaries: And of course, the transcribe audio part.
- "Resident Evil" is somehow transcribed as "great seeing you"
- "What in Ronald racquel"
- Funny.Heroes: Hiro's nerd-riffic Word Salad after he gets his brain scrambled.Ando: "It's like someone took a shabu spoon and stirred up his fanboy brain."
- Funny.Kirby Star Allies: What’s funnier is the fact that thanks to a handy translation guide in the Flavor Text, you can actually understand what Hyness is trying to say. Doing this, the message he blurts out in the Corrupt Hyness fight roughly translates to “very tasty painful hope”. Hope he enjoys that painful hope.
- Funny.Yogscast: "Zombie With A Portal Gun" includes this hilarious moment:Sjin: It's like I always say, "appreciate what you what, be are the make you appreciate what you dad."
Everyone bursts into laughter
Ben: Are you having a stroke?! - LetsPlay.Crazy Commentaries: These two lapse into this very often. For example, during their outros, Jay does random gibberish.
- Literature.Quiller: Quiller is injected with a drug designed to make him high and therefore talkative; they get some facts out of the subsequent Word Salad, but not enough. Quiller does reveal too much about his obsession for a girl he's met, however, so they decide to use that angle to force his co-operation.
- Manga.Baoh: Some of Baoh's special abilities have some really Word Salad titles (with "phenomenon" added on the end) to them, including "Reskinharden Saber Phenomenon" (arm blades), "Shooting Bees Stingers Phenomenon" (razor sharp hair fired as projectiles from one's head) and "Meltedin Palm Phenomenon" (corrosive acid from the hands.)
- Manga.Wasteful Days Of Highschool Girls: The "Moon! dass! cry!" all over the OP's refrain looks like Word Salad, but it's intended to emulate the "Mudazukai" in the title.
- Music.Bad Lip Reading: Due to the fact that the whole thing is Word Salad, a lot of things make no sense, or make sense but are brought up for no reason.
- Music.Miyavi: His English has improved immensely over the past decade. Since his overseas career has taken off, his marriage to Melody Ishikawa (a Japanese-American pop-star turned fashion designer) in 2009, and moving to Los Angeles in 2014, he's went from borderline-incomprehensible Word Salad Gratuitous Engrish speaker to almost-but-not-quite fluent English speaker.
- Narm.The King Of Fighters: One for the entire series is the...bizarre song names given to its many characters. One can't fail but laugh when they hear the awe-inspiring, dramatic and intimidating theme used for Goenitz only to find its official name is..."Trash Head" (the official version is that the title refers to his hairdo, but still). Additionally, Jivatma gets the very on-the-nose "Giving a Manicure to the Fingernails of Darkness", Verse has the really unfitting and Word Salad-y "Independence from an Aggregate" and before he got "Save the Universe", Igniz got a theme song simply named "I'm the Strongest", a title that couldn't be any more arrogant and brutally to-the-point if it tried (and its only saved by Igniz actually being tough as nails) - unless, of course, you think of Antonov's "I'm THE KING OF FIGHTERS" (yes, capitalized and everything).
- PlayingWith.Last Second Word Swap: His entire sentence gets randomly word-swapped into a Word Salad. Under parodied.
- Recap.Unreall Temple Of Vandora: These ancient chambers sanctify examples of:
- Theatre.The Trail To Oregon: "Sometimes It Pays To Be an Animal" appears to be a philosophical defense of eating meat garbled by Grandpa's senility into Word Salad. It seems to convince the Son through sheer intimidation.
- Trivia.Albert Campion: In The Fashion in Shrouds, Lugg says "it's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide," which is hardboiled British slang for "it's crazy to bribe a police officer with counterfeit money." However, this comes across as a total Word Salad in American English, and was used as a Running Gag in MAD for many years.
- Series.Twin Peaks: In-universe, the FBI uses a visual variant of this (seen in the form of Lil the dancing girl) and it is implied they utilize the phrase "Blue Rose" as a code for cases that may involve the supernatural or other bizarre phenomena. Also arguably one interpretation of Gordon Cole's bizarre Word Salad one-liners.
- VideoGame.Assault Android Cactus: All four Section Lords openly fear or hate Starch, as shown in their pre-fight banter with her. Starch's replies, in turn, are all seemingly Word Salad-esque ramblings about playing or toying with them.
- VideoGame.Sunless Sea: One of the possible tips on a loading screen:"In the Iron Republic, the red night favours the smokes of mind. Eat rain!
- VisualNovel.Doki Doki Literature Club: As a result of this, Yuri's last poems become a kind of self-parody too. Normally, she likes complex words and indirect metaphors. Her second to last poem is practically Word Salad in consisting of groups of fancy words creating obtuse potentially metaphorical images.
- WebAnimations.Buttons Adventures: Happens with Button after he stays up all night playing a game.Mother: ...Have you been up all night?
Button: No, it's okay. The cat's got it with the salad.
Mother: What?
Button: I already put— I— uh— the— wh— the French toast. - WesternAnimation.Darkstalkers: Anakaris. Apparently, the writers took the "brain removal" part of mummification and ran with it, resulting in him being a Talkative Loon who speaks primarily in Word Salad.
- WesternAnimation.Goof Troop: Madame Zeldarina makes up Word Salad to tell Pete what his good luck charm is. It turns out this Word Salad perfectly describes Goofy, and Zeldarina is surprised Pete managed to find someone who fit that description.
- Wrestling.Billy Gunn: Voodoo Kin Mafia had absolutely nothing to do with voodoo, kin, or mafia. Eventually, "Voodoo Queen" Roxxi Laveaux was added to the group (basically a white female Papa Shango) but as time went on, the Voodoo element of Laveaux's gimmick became so watered down as to be non existent. Yet she remained with BG and Kip James until Kip "fired" her.
- YMMV.Beetlejuice: In the movie, civil servants and bureaucrats in general, are depicted as being short tempered, snarky professionals up to their eyeballs in paperwork who overcomplicate the situations at hand, and are unhelpful in general. Even the Handbook for the Recently Deceased, which is meant to help orient a ghost, is shown to be an overcomplicated Word Salad, which "reads like stereo instructions" to the Maitlands.
- YMMV.Sable: Back in 1993, Lady Victoria started getting popular in Mexico, working for both EMLL and AAA. One of her red barons was "The Sable Luna", which was Word Salad in the sense "Sable" was associated with Masked Luchador who had a swash buckling gimmick and while Luna Vachon was established, it would be hard to call miss Victoria a combination of the two. Five years later, as Luna feuded with a new female Sable, the title retroactively became very appropriate.
A Talkative Loon example under the wrong name
- Bizzare Alien Psychology: In Perdido Street Station, the Weaver's weird mindset is represented by its non-stop, stream-of-consciousness Word Salad monologue. Its psychology becomes a key plot point, as it's perhaps the only living sentient in New Crobuzon whose consciousness the slake-moths can't consume.
- Archive.Lost And Found: I read a book where the narrator is a paranoid schizophrenic, and the voices in his head often interrupt him to make snarky comments. Their more nonsensical lines are also written across the bottoms of the pages in a different font, e.g. "Squish-wish! Squish-wish! Don't you wish you could squish a wish?" First, what role do the voices serve? They're not representing the audience, so they're not a Greek Chorus. Second, is there a trope for the unusual marginalia? If this is a consistent character trait, it's Talkative Loon
- Characters.Trainspotting: A dealer in Tollcross who serves as Johnny's sidekick. Known for his Cloudcuckoo Lander behavior and for spouting bizarre, nonsensical phrases.
- PsychopathicManchild.Video Games: Professor Pyg from Batman: Arkham Knight. His comics counterpart was no paragon of sanity either, but the video game swaps out his Word Salad insanity and exchanges it for childlike temper tantrums, simplistic speech, and references to a being called "Mother" that will be unhappy if Batman prevents him from making more of his kidnapped, brainwashed automatons called "Dollotrons". Said mother is a wooden carving hanging on his wall covered in nails and barbed wire. "Word Salad insanity seems to mean Talkative Loon.'''"Pyg make you perfect."
- Webcomic.The Super Fogeys: The Human Aliens Star Maiden, now — but not when younger. She has Dark and Troubled Past involving two kinds of Parental Abandonment, but she got better once she hit Earth and was treated far better by its inhabitants. You don't get to see it for the most part... but every now and then, she might let a little thing slip during her Word Salad. Again, if it's a consistent thing, I think it's Talkative Loon
Misuse
- Descended Creator: Animator Sam Marin voiced Celestabellebethabelle in the episode "The Last Mabelcorn". Not sure if a single-word character name counts...
- Funny.Etika: It takes him several minutes to get through one minute of Jake Paul's "It's Everyday, Bro" music video. He breaks down laughing to the point that he sinks into his chair after hearing the "And I’m selling like a godchurch." lyric. That line is infamously bad, but I don't think it's Word Salad.
- WebVideo.Profound Moments In Left 4 Dead 2: Archaon engages in one when the team takes the elevator in the mall. Not Word Salad so much as Motor MouthArchaon: I have high respect for this game if you can drive a car...and, auerh...ifyoucandriveacaryoucangojustaboutanywhereyoulikeandyouknow, youcangoanywhereinlifeandbeaverysuccessfulmanandallthatfreshairandexercisewilldoyoualotofgood. 'K, let's go.
Aovnick: What the heck did you just say? - UsefulNotes.Joe Biden: Despite Trump's own tendency to say widely derided nonsensical things, his campaign tried to portray Biden as "senile" and "in cognitive decline", particularly honing in on Biden's less than fluent speech patterns. Putting this here due to ROCEJ concerns and the fact that I don't think anything Trump said actually qualifies as Word Salad.
ZCE/Misc
- Blog.Topless Robot: "The Crudetons in your Word Salad" The image caption
- Characters.Parties And Parodies: After going insane from an encounter in the cultists' temple, this happens.
- Literature.Bas Lag Cycle: The Weaver.
- VideoGame.Hylics: The entire first game and a final third of the second.
- Webcomic.Captain Broadband: When Captain Broadband explains anything.
