What is the silliest TV or movie trope?
Post your answer in the LEAVE A COMMENT section below. I’m not the boss of you, though. Don’t write anything for all I care! But I’d love to know if you’re a Damsel in Distress, Final Girl, or Chosen One.
. . .here are my thoughts.
What is the silliest TV or movie trope?
That classic trope involving an English as a Second Language (ESL) character. You know the one: they speak virtually perfect English—you even have to pause the show to Google the meaning of a couple English words they say—yet they inevitably utter, “How do you say …?” Not even a full second later, the exact phrase they need rolls right out of their mouth. Far too often it’s a simple word like “mental” that viewers would assume they’d easily remember. Especially since they just got done spitting out “heuristic” and “confirmation bias”! (Both of which are on my personal “Words I Can’t Remember” list.) It’s almost like there’s a legal mandate for shows to toss in a “How do you say …?” simply to remind the audience that the character is an ESL speaker. I can’t wait for this trope to be taken to its ridiculous extreme. A native French speaker says:
“How do you say? … Je ne sais quoi.”
You know—that French phrase borrowed directly into English meaning “a quality that cannot be described or named easily.” The phrase which, in French, literally means “I don’t know what.”