The movie that my friends and I watched was Heathers. It is considered a black comedy therefore, it contains foul language. I personally thought the movie was quite boring and even difficult to understand in certain scenes. This film was released in 1989 so the type of language that the characters used back then does not sound like things we would typically say nowadays. The slangs they used could easily relate to the ones teens use today. However, when the characters insult one another, they use weird sentences like “stop pulling on my dick” even though the person that said it was a girl. Personally, that was weird to me. As for my non-language village friend that also watched the film with me, he found the movie to be funny and confusing at the same time. I agree because the casual conversations between characters seem to be so complex and they use weird words. Instead of saying “what’s up” or “hey,” a character in the film says “greetings and salutations” which is very strange because it sounds very formal.

In the scene where one of the rich, popular girl named “Heather” dies, the killers plan to fake a suicidal note and one of them decides to use the word “myriad” in it. However, they realized that “Heather” would’ve never used that word, simply implying that she is stupid. In the next scene where the school board teachers discuss Heather’s apparent suicide, one of them said “I’m surprised she used the word myriad in her suicidal note.” From this, viewers can reach a conclusion that rich people are often dumb because they don’t feel the need to be educated if they have money and fame.

– Jia Wen Xu

Language Village

Me and Paula had a 2 day movie night and watched Heather’s on Netflix. It was a very strange film, and we saw a few connections to Linguistics. First we noticed that they used a lot of language that we do not use much today such as “Salutations” when saying hello to someone or “fuck me gently with a chainsaw” when referring to being offended by another person. As we watched the film we also saw one of the actors compare two styles of saying “tomato”. They also used “awesome” and “cool” and “totally” more than we hear on average today. The film tends to use English in their own purpose and sense. For example, being called a “heather” at Western berg high school was the coolest thing to be named. They changed an average named to signify something of their own in the film. This film refers back to linguistics because we have spoken how English is an extremely complicated language because people use it in their own sense and you can make sense of phrases in so many different ways. The language in this film also makes a statement that the type of language you use defines whether you are cool and popular or not. There were names given to the unpopular fat, nerdy, or out of the circle kids and the “popular” kids were talked to differently and referred to differently as well. even though the movie was a litttleeee creepy, it was a good entertaining movie!