awesome sauce!

[Paul Johnston]

There was a guy I knew in 1975 at U. of Michigan who was kind of an ultimate Angeleno. who said "Yo tengo a la sauce!" whenever he liked something a lot, and "Check this sauce out." (And sometimes, "Sauce this sauce out." meaning "Check it out."  His usual greeting to people was "What's your story?"

By the time we finished one semester with him in the same house, we had a whole dictionary worth of "Ronisms".

Paul Johnston
On May 11, 2014, at 8:32 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      awesome sauce!
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> OK, there's like this girl on TV? And she's advertising the same bank that
> offers either frog protection or fraud protection depending on which guy
> you believe? So she's so happy with the promised service that she shouts,
> "Awesome sauce!" and the girl on the other end of the phone says there's
> only one other person on the planet who uses that expression!  So they
> recognize each other.
>
> This ad has been running for months, exposing millions to the inanity that
> is "awesome sauce!"
>
> UrbanDictionary gives two examples (2005, 2006) and a couple of odd clones
> like "awesome sauce banana peel!"
>
> You can buy T-shirts too.
>
> Antonyms include "weak sauce"  and "lame sauce," acc. to Online Slang
> Dictionary.
>
> The incredibly large-scale map provided by OSD (not OED) shows,
> astonishingly, that "awesome sauce!" is used in only one place on earth,
> near the town of Castlegar, British Columbia, which is north of Trail.
>
> JL
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
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