"I Shit My Pants":
Spontaneous Ancient Literary Structure in Modern Colloquial Speech
Part III: The Text
Below is the transcript of our primary source, a voicemail originating from a native English speaker (dialect: Michigan), recorded September, 2004:
01: Hey
02: If you called me back, I missed it.
03: I was at the grocery store.
04: Where I just shit my pants.
05: I SHIT MY PANTS!
06: At the grocery store.
07: [Laughs]
08: Yeah!
09: I didn't even take my cart back to the Cart Corral.
10: [Laughs]
11: And then I told this lady, I said "What? I shit my pants!"
12: And she didn't even ASK me.
13: She was ... looking at me like i was insane.
14: 'Cos I think I might be. I don't know.
15: Is that crazy?
16: Alright. Bye.
On the face of it (discounting, perhaps, the subject matter), there would seem to be nothing out of the ordinary about this voicemail. It seems to be a rather typical sample of current vernacular U.S. English language speech.
Careful analysis, however, reveals something more.
(Proceed to Chiasmus)
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