Timeline for What explains this dialogue sequence in the movie "Get Out"?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Oct 16 at 18:18 | comment | added | Zan700 | Snitch and tattletale are interchangeable in Am E, regardless of race, but tattletale was the polite word for children to use, especially in school. Admittedly tattletale has fallen out of usage, but if you used it in your youth . . . Today, prison rules dominate classrooms, so "snitches get stitches" is a common expression and attitude. | |
| Oct 16 at 15:04 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | So either the scriptwriter got lucky, or he specifically chose the words to reflect the older woman's likely vocabulary. Nothing to do with race, though. Just age. | |
| Oct 16 at 15:03 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | I think @Lambie has nailed it. Before the Internet, rat [someone] out was virtually unknown by comparison with tattetale. But over the last couple of decades the latter has moved up to the top slot. | |
| Oct 16 at 14:20 | comment | added | Lambie | Yes, that's right, Bravo. tattletale is fuddy-duddy, and not limited to BrE speakers at all. The others are slang. "grass", "fit up" for snitch are the BrE words I hear in UK police procedurals. | |
| Oct 16 at 12:12 | comment | added | Bravo | @FumbleFingers: If there is no race connotation to the dialogue, then the only logic I can figure is the age - perhaps "tattletale" is a word older people tend to use, and "snitch" and "rat out" are younger people's usage, which the grandmother (inside the black woman's body) finds it difficult to pick. | |
| Oct 16 at 9:24 | answer | added | Stuart F | timeline score: -1 | |
| Oct 16 at 6:14 | comment | added | Sven Yargs | Tattle tale (meaning "A revealer of secrets; an informer") appears in Maurice Weseen, Dictionary of American Slang (1934) under the heading of "General Slang." In Texas in the early 1960s, young children would chant at a peer who "told on them" to adults in positions of authority: "Tattletale, tattletale, sitting on a bull's tail!" With or without the chant, tattletale was a common term at that time. Snitch in the sense of "inform on" has been in U.S. English since about 1920. Wentworth & Flexner, American Slang Dictionary (1960) describe this slang verb as "Common since c1920." | |
| Oct 16 at 3:37 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | Actually, this usage chart suggests that snitch (as both verb and noun) temporarily gained much traction in AmE, which is now falling off. I haven't checked the subtitles, but maybe JK Rowling used it in the Harry Potter books / movies. | |
| Oct 16 at 3:09 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | Well, rat <someone> out is 100% lower-class AmE, but snitch and tattletale are more typically BrE middle-class expressions. But that's not really relevant, In context, they're all just "race-agnostic" synonyms. Look elsewhere for the message of the movie (which is well worth the watch, as I recall). The movie is aimed at the international market, imho. | |
| Oct 16 at 2:50 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | <spoiler alert> The fact of the guy being black is central to the progress of the movie. But in direct terms, that's nothing to do with the fragment of dialogue you've cited (there's no allusion to race there). None of the terms snitch, rat out, tattletale have anything to do with the fact that the girl didn't tell her family that her latest boyfriend is black. But obviously that is central to the movie! In fact, all of those slang/ idiomatic verbs are synonymous with "betray" - they're typical of middle-class white British speakers, not remotely associated with AmE black speakers. | |
| Oct 16 at 1:02 | history | edited | Laurel♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 2 characters in body
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| Oct 16 at 0:53 | history | asked | Bravo | CC BY-SA 4.0 |