A spit-take is a comedic technique or reaction in which someone spits a drink, or sometimes food, out of their mouth as a reaction to a surprising or funny statement.
An essential part of the spit-take is comedic timing. The person performing the spit-take usually starts drinking or eating right before the punchline is delivered. When the joke hits, the person accentuates the effect by pretending that the alleged humor/shock is so overwhelming and irresistible, that they cannot even control the urge of laughter/scream before swallowing, and therefore has to reflexively spit out the mouthful of content to prevent choking.
In performance, a spit-take represents a reaction of shock, while in real life it is typically one of mirth.
"Spit take" was included in the Oxford Dictionaries (not to be confused with the Oxford English Dictionary ) in a 2014 update. [1] It was also added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in an April 2019 update.
The spit-take, as a comedic technique, is a noun, but it shows up in media in some different forms. It can be seen used figuratively in a description of a satire work, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping : "(it) is a spit-take on the world of contemporary pop music and celebrity..."
It can also be used as a verb: "On the morning of May 12, LinkedIn ... emailed scores of my contacts and told them I'm a professional racist. It was one of those updates that LinkedIn regularly sends its users, algorithmically assembled missives about their connections' appearances in the media.... This surely caused a few of my professional acquaintances to spit-take. — Will Johnson, Slate , 24 May 2016." [2]
The conjugation of spit-take as a verb is not clearly defined. There is evidence of both "spit-taked" and "spit took." Constructions like "made me spit-take" are convenient for avoiding this issue all together. Beyond that, leaving the phrase as a noun, like "do a spit-take," continues to be the most common usage.
Originally called a spit gag, the word itself most likely dates to the early 20th century, but it mostly existed in showbiz vernacular.
Danny Thomas, commonly associated with the spit-take, is credited[ by whom? ] as the comedian who made it famous. It is sometimes referred to as the "Danny Thomas spit take." He perfected it during the 11 seasons of The Danny Thomas Show (1953-1964). However, Ricky Ricardo did it a year earlier in an I Love Lucy (1951-1957) episode. Also a year before Thomas, a spit-take was performed by David Bruce in a 1952 episode of Beulah (1950-1953), "The New Arrival." It has been used in several sitcoms since.
The "spit" part of the term is clear, but the "take" part is a little less obvious. In this context, the word "take" is used in the sense of a visible response or reaction (as to something unexpected). It is similar in construction to the phrase "double-take". [3]
A thesaurus, sometimes called a synonym dictionary or dictionary of synonyms, is a reference work which arranges words by their meanings, sometimes as a hierarchy of broader and narrower terms, sometimes simply as lists of synonyms and antonyms. They are often used by writers to help find the best word to express an idea:
...to find the word, or words, by which [an] idea may be most fitly and aptly expressed
English grammar is the set of structural rules of the English language. This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and whole texts.
A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means precisely or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. For example, in the English language, the words begin, start, commence, and initiate are all synonyms of one another: they are synonymous. The standard test for synonymy is substitution: one form can be replaced by another in a sentence without changing its meaning.
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Literal and figurative language is a distinction that exists in all natural languages; it is studied within certain areas of language analysis, in particular stylistics, rhetoric, and semantics.
A compound is a word composed of more than one free morpheme. The English language, like many others, uses compounds frequently. English compounds may be classified in several ways, such as the word classes or the semantic relationship of their components.
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Verbs constitute one of the main parts of speech in the English language. Like other types of words in the language, English verbs are not heavily inflected. Most combinations of tense, aspect, mood and voice are expressed periphrastically, using constructions with auxiliary verbs.
A contronym is a word with two opposite meanings. For example, the word cleave can mean "to cut apart" or "to bind together". This feature is also called enantiosemy, enantionymy, antilogy or autoantonymy. An enantiosemic term is by definition polysemic.
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A compound modifier is a compound of two or more attributive words: that is, two or more words that collectively modify a noun. Compound modifiers are grammatically equivalent to single-word modifiers and can be used in combination with other modifiers.
In morphology and lexicography, a lemma is the canonical form, dictionary form, or citation form of a set of word forms. In English, for example, break, breaks, broke, broken and breaking are forms of the same lexeme, with break as the lemma by which they are indexed. Lexeme, in this context, refers to the set of all the inflected or alternating forms in the paradigm of a single word, and lemma refers to the particular form that is chosen by convention to represent the lexeme. Lemmas have special significance in highly inflected languages such as Arabic, Turkish, and Russian. The process of determining the lemma for a given lexeme is called lemmatisation. The lemma can be viewed as the chief of the principal parts, although lemmatisation is at least partly arbitrary.
English prepositions are words – such as of, in, on, at, from, etc. – that function as the head of a prepositional phrase, and most characteristically license a noun phrase object. Semantically, they most typically denote relations in space and time. Morphologically, they are usually simple and do not inflect. They form a closed lexical category.
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Alumni are former students or graduates of a school, college, or university. The feminine plural alumnae is sometimes used for groups of women, and alums or alumns as gender-neutral alternatives. The word comes from Latin, meaning nurslings, pupils or foster children, derived from alere "to nourish".
In English, possessive words or phrases exist for nouns and most pronouns, as well as some noun phrases. These can play the roles of determiners or of nouns.
Some of the most notable differences between American English and British English are grammatical.