Is "Introduction to Making" Funny?
Depending on where you're from and who you are, I can predict your answer.
In the language wars, I am pretty firmly a descriptivist (rather than a prescriptivist) but even descriptivists have pet peeves, and one of mine is basketball announcers who refer to “made three-pointers,” “made baskets,” and “made field goals.” My problem here is redundancy—three-pointers, baskets, and field goals have by definition been made. But a separate issue is I find those phrases funny. Along with referring to a basket as a “make.”
To give you a sense of why, I quote from a message sent in 2017 to the language columnist of the Jewish magazine Tikvah, who has the pen name Philologus. The correspondent, an academic dean at MIT, wrote:
Last year, I found myself in a meeting at which the head of the entrepreneurship center was describing a new course he was excited about. Related to what has lately been described as the “Maker Movement,” it was to be a joint project of the Management and Mechanical Engineering departments that was supposed to get engineers and managers more involved in manufacturing by closing the gap between designs and products.
After stating this in his introductory remarks, the proposed giver of the course then announced its name: “Intro to Making.”
This cracked the dean up. However, he reported, “when I looked around the room, I saw that no one was smiling but me.”
Here is my litmus test. You will find “Intro to Making” and “made baskets” funny if you are a (say) 50-plus-year-old person from an Ashkenazi Jewish background and/or the New York City metropolitan area; and/or you write movies or TV shows (rubbing shoulders with many a Jew); and/or you are an avid reader of the books of Judy Blume.
Such people, you see, understand “make” as a word used to and by children (and in reference to pets) meaning “defecate.” Use it in a sentence? Sure: “I have to make,” “She is making,” “Did Fido make?”
With this understanding, many other things are funny, including the Mafia expression “made man”; a Philadelphia university’s motto, “Temple Made”; and the sign on a bridge across the Delaware River in central New Jersey.
I am a Jewish native New Yorker well over 50 and this “make” was a commonplace of my childhood. I asked my Facebook friends about it and their responses were consistent with my litmus, in fact helped me devise it. So were many of the 85 responses to a similar query posted on MetaFilter, also in 2017. The answers there yielded, as well, an impressive number of pop culture citations, including the appearance of “make” in Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing and other novels by Blume (Jewish, born in New Jersey in 1938), as well as:
“An episode of King of the Hill in which Bobby mentions yogurt that ‘helps you make.’”
“found it I believe in the novel (not the short story) Flowers for Algernon” [by Daniel Keyes, Jewish New Yorker, born 1927]
“Ross on Friends yells at the dog to ‘make’ while out in the snow during a blizzard in the episode that Phoebe and Paul Rudd get married.”
“First time I heard it was when one of the characters in Ghostbusters says that he had been stuck in an elevator and had to ‘make’ the whole time...”
“I’ve lived in lots of places in the US and I’d never heard it until an episode of Parks and Recreation where guest star and Eagletonian Parker Posey feeds a waffle made in Pawnee to her dog” and (apparently) says, “Sambuca need to make?”
“Frank on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia uses this term for pooping. I didn't know it was something people actually say--I figured it was some weird Frank-ism. I definitely never heard it growing up (Seattle).”
I was glad to read that last one because Frank is played by Danny DeVito—not Jewish, but a New Yorker from the Jersey side—and he was responsible for the only use of the term in movies or TV I was previously aware of. It’s in a Saturday Night Live segment with Mike Myers, playing the peculiar English boy Simon, and it comes at the 1:51 mark.
It may seem that I am harping on Jewishness but it is key. Specifically, the usage comes from the Yiddish word makhn, meaning “to make.” Philologos writes in Tikvah that the defecate meaning isn’t given in most Yiddish dictionaries, but
it is listed as a toilet term in Nahum Stutchkoff’s compendious thesaurus Der Oytser fun der Yiddisher Shprakh. When I asked a friend who is a native speaker of Yiddish to confirm this, she wrote back: “Yes, we did say makhn in our very refined family. As far as I know, the verb never took a direct object. It referred only to defecation, not urination.”
And this in turn derives from the German word for make. I asked my friend and neighbor Hansjakob Werlen, a professor of Germanic studies at Swarthmore College about this, and he replied, “The term machen when on the toilet, especially kids, does indeed indicate a successful completion of Nr 2.”
That leaves only one issue: age. I indicated above that the usage is familiar to people of my ilk who are over 50 or so. My sense is that baby boomers and the older members of Gen X who grew up with it did not, for the most part, pass it on to their children. I didn’t, I suppose because it was something I wanted to leave behind. (Not literally). Someone who posted a response on MetaFilter expressed such a feeling strongly:
Oh my god, yes! My parents used "make" and it was mortifying. No one ever knew what it meant and it made my (older, foreign) parents seem even more uncool.
My mother still uses the word and every time she does I flash back to the time in 1976 that Linda R spent the night, and at bedtime my mom came in and asked if we needed "to make" before bed and Linda asked, "Make what?"
Now write about "after" and the Irish. ("I'm after going to the store for my messages...")
Here in New Orleans, I was fascinated to hear locally-raised people use the term “use it.” A kid in a classroom would raise their hand to ask the teacher, “Can I use it?” or “I have to use it” to ask for a restroom hall pass.