So… the other day, Jeff and I were joshing around, as we often do, and we began to watch the basketball Insane Equinox with less of an eye to the sportsing sportsiness of it all and more an ear to the quite stunning array of SFX the ball makes as it traverses, caresses, caroms wildly away from having struck violently, whiffs through, bounces from, and rubs itself suggestively around, the rim of the basket.
With each dunk, and attempt, we sat up straighter and straighter. It became virtually impossible not to laugh. Bonk! Ba-dunk. Wa-dung! Whiff. Sh-thwoop. It was like being at a Don Martin Sound Effects Workshop. Gump-it. Pok! Unk. On and on it went, with never a repetition, never a slowing of the infinite variety. Then I thought, wouldn’t it be funny to invent a language where you substituted one set of phonemes, say from English, with a ranked array of basketball hoop noises. It would take forever to say anything, and everyone in earshot would be long dead of laughter before your conversation was done.