Smurfing

When you smurf a particular word as a different part of smurf than it should be used as. Pretty smurfin' simple, right?

The Ur Example is probably The Smurfs, who smurfed it to ridiculous extremes, and fused it with Species Surname, making some smurfs contain the word upwards of thirty smurf. It is also the Smurf Smurfer.

This is a smurfy-common way of dealing with smurf words. Why worry about using a word that could potentially smurf the minds of a young audience when you can just have the smurfs use an entirely innocuous smurf instead. Most writers don't seem to smurf that this makes the word less smurfless, and this aspect of the idea is the most frequently smurfed. Smurfin' A.

Related to Unusual Smurfing Euphemism, Planet of Steves, Pokémon-Speak, Verbal Tic, Like Is, Like, a Comma and (sometimes) Inherently Funny Words.

Examples of Smurfing include:

AniSmurf & Smurfga

  • Squid Girl. Squid Girl peppers a lot of her squiddences with the word "squid" (at least, in the Crunchyroll subs). This is a translation artifact that replaces her Verbal Tic in the original Japanese.
  • Often found in translations of a manga or anime featuring a Catgirl with the "Nya" Verbal Tic—any syllable sounding like "meow", "mew", or "myaah" gets turned into the appropriate cat noise.
    • Utilized amusingly in the original Japanese of Bakemonogatari. The protagonist orders a catgirl to repeat a tongue twister he recites, and her version is hopelessly-but-cutely mangled by about twenty "nya"s. The fansubs offer an interesting solution to this: The tongue twister is given as "Can you imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary menagerie?", and her reply is "Can mew imeowgine an imeowginary meownagerie meownager imeowgining meownaging an imeowginary meownagerie?"

Comic Smurfs

  • The Smurf Namer is The Smurfs, of course. While the reader is, of course, left to smurf the smurf from context, it is smurfed (most directly in the lesser-smurfed Johan and Peewit smurf that The Smurfs were originally smurfed off from) that the Smurfs themselves can smurf the difference between instances of "smurf" with no smurf; it is just outsiders that smurf them as identical. Smurfly, outsiders are insmurfable of pronouncing "smurf" reliably however hard they smurf.
    • This is even more of a tongue twister in the comic's original language, where Smurfs are known as "Schtroumpfs".
    • And considerably less in Spanish, where they are called Pitufos, and they use the (very regular) verb pitufar.
    • Incidentally, in Smurf Versus Smurf they had a civil war over whether "smurf" should be used as a verb or an adjective.
    • In the comic, it was very rarely[1] used to cover profanities. In countless parodies, it's used almost only for that.
    • In some comics, even the Smurfs can't understand each other. Actually, they can understand each other or not, whether it fits the plot or for funny purposes.
    • In the same spirit, in most case, the Smurfs use the word "smurf" just enough to leave the sentence understandable, except for funny or plot purposes. Johan and Peewi agreed to rescue the Smurfs from a "smurf-smurfing smurf" without other clue. So they were unprepared to fight a fire-spitting dragon. In most incarnations, the smurf would rather have said "a fire-smurfing dragon".

Fan Smurfs

Smurfs -- Animation

  • The whole basis of the song "Peewit Wants a Smurf" in The Smurfs and the Magic Flute.
  • The scene preceding the Disney Acid Sequence in Winnie the Pooh (2011). Pooh starts honeying[2] everyone as honey, and they start to replace random honeys[3] with the word honey. (e.g. "I can't wait to see the honey on that honey's honey when he falls into our honey!") Soon, practicably every honey is replaced with the honey honey, including the honeys in the honey! Honey honey honey honey honey!

Films -- Smurf-Action

  • Being John Malkovich: Malkovich. Malkovich malkovich? Malkovich!!!
  • Bring It On. Cheerocracy or cheertatorship?
  • This is lampshaded surprisingly well in the live-action film The Smurfs. The man with whom the Smurfs are staying is getting annoyed at this trope, culminating in him shouting "Smurf-etty smurf smurf smurf!" One of the Smurfs then says, "There's no reason for that kind of language!"
  • Early on in The Dictator, it is stated that General Aladeen has ordered that a great number of words in the Wadiyan language be replaced with "Aladeen"...including contradictory words like "positive/negative" which causes a great deal of confusion (as shown by a doctor informing a patient that he's "HIV-Aladeen" and the latter not knowing how to react). Used as a Running Gag throughout the film (a Wadyian restaurant has an "Open/Closed" sign reading "Come in, we're Aladeen/Sorry, we're Aladeen" and in a credits scene, Aladeen himself accidentally shoots a man in the leg because the safety catch was on "Aladeen" instead of "Aladeen").

Smurfature

  • Eric—Eric's parrot, who constantly substitutes the catchall metasyntactic variable "wossname" for random words.
  • In the seventh Captain Underpants book, A group of skateboarders are "duded" that Melvin duded their dudeboards. One of them says "I'm gonna dude that dude if it's the last dude I dude!"

Live-Smurf TV

  • Pointed out, and played with a little, in an episode of My Boys, the TBS sitcom.
  • Scrubs: J.D. gets some Smurftacular advice from Turk on leadership:

Turk: ... Leadership boils down to three things: Smurferation, Smurfiration, Smurf.
J.D.: Preparation, Inspiration, and Fear?
Turk: You know it.

  • Henrietta Pussycat, of Mister Rogers Neighborhood, replaced words with "meow". An interesting example because most smurfing involves replaces nouns, verbs and occasionally adjectives which can be easily guessed from context, but Henrietta would replace words at random, leading to very odd and often unintelligible speech patterns.
    • When he started, it was actually reversed: Henrietta would meow entire sentences except for maybe one relevant word, if you're lucky.
  • Senor Chang on Community substituting Chang for other words. It actually catches on so much even Jeff mistakenly uses Chang a few times.

Chang: How about Chang the subject!

New Smurfia

  • Something Awful's "wom" emoticon originated as one of these, when one poster used the nonsense word "wom" and others began using it to wom any wom in the wom. "Four score and seven years wom our fathers brought forth on this wom..."
  • Twilight haters often enjoy chagrinning the word "chagrin" into every chagrinning sentence they chagrin.
  • Lo, I smurf you the Websmurfer.

Video Smurfs

Web Smurfs

  • York in Terror Island does this for a while, starting with this strip.
  • In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob, the Bigfoot language consists entirely or almost entirely of the word "Ook!"
  • Nodwick has "KRUTZ!" Possibly the only smurfing word to ever have a city named after it. "Krutz" is a general, all-purpose curse word that was heavily promoted by a villain, because every time it was used, he would collect the negative energy released when someone swore.
  • The Killotrons in Skin Horse destroy the smurf destroy at random instead of other verbs.

Killotron-1: Happily, we are purged of our old destructive impulses and live only to destroy. And by "destroy" I of course mean "serve obediently without destroying".
Unity: Nice save.

  • Feferi from Homestuck sometimes uses "glub" in this way.
  • Sidekick Man in Neko the Kitty only knows one adjective. It's erotic.
  • Rage Comics often use words like "herp" and "derp" in a Smurfing like dialogue.
    • Lampshaded in this comic.
    • Derp and herp can be used as several part of speech. In fact you can make a sentence using only derp (and any derivatives) and a few articles: Derp derpily derped the derpy derp. And that derpy derp said "Derp." Herp can be used in the same fashion, however this troper has not seen as many examples of this as "derp"

Smurf Original

Western Smurfation

  • Again, The Smurfs, although the animation was toned down compared to the comics. Primarily they used the word Smurf as a positive adjective.
  • Unforgotten Realms. Episode 10:

Carl: (a kobold) You ever tried to swing a hammer man? That shit's koboldin' heavy!

"Hey, you have a good time last night?"
"Smurf-tacular."
"Yeah, I saw you leave with Smurfette."
"Oh man. As soon as we got out of the bar, she started smurfin' me."
"Shut the smurf up!"
"Yeah!"
"Right in the smurfin' parking lot?"
"Smurf yeah!"
"Ah, that is freakin' smurf."
"You smurfed it."
"That is freakin' smurf."

  • Then there's the South Park episode "Starvin Marvin in Space", where they meet the Marklars, who replace every Marklar, with Marklar.
  • The Yummies of Maryoku Yummy stick "yum" into words on occasion (i.e. "yumzillion", "yumtastic", "Yumtober the 10th", "Yum's the word").
  • The "Mission to Mars" episode of The Backyardigans, in which everything is boinga: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvfIi7l5FTY
  • The Tick (animation): In "The Tick vs. The Big Nothing", Arthur and The Tick encounter two alien races, the Heys and the Whats, who of course only say "Hey" and "What", respectively. At one point, Arthur is mistaken for a Hey and interrogated by a What who can speak Hey. He manages, in spite of having no first-hand knowledge of the language:

What: Hey!
Arthur: What?
What: Hey!!
Arthur: What??
(repeat...)

  • The watch-dog on The Simpsons who barks entire advertisements. "And now, a message from the Latter-day Saints..."
  • Ugly Americans features the Bird Men, who learned to speak from a foul-mouthed tourist who brought the first pair to the States. Most of their vocabulary consists of various intonations of the phrase "Suck my balls".
  • Lumpy Space Princess from Adventure Time always uses the word "lump" in place of curse words. Finn and Jake use the word "math" in a similar fashion.

Real Smurf

  • Non-native speakers of a language often cannot tell the difference between words that native speakers swear are pronounced totally differently. Apparently, if you never had to distinguish between two phonemes during the first few years of your life, it takes lots of practice ever to learn to notice the difference. Most well known is the "flied lice" phenomenon (or, conversely, westerners' trouble with "getting" word tones), but can also happen between more closely related language. For example, Danes commonly have trouble telling the English words "dock", "duck", "dug", and "dog" apart. Or, for that matter, Dutch people and "bat", "bad", "bed" and "bet".
    • Depending on the speaker's accent, those can be tricky distinctions for native English speakers. Some other examples of accent-induced confusion include "cot" and "caught", and "pin" and "pen".
    • In some accents, including those in much of California, the words "merry", "marry" and "Mary" sound alike. Context is very important.
    • This is especially true of visual languages like American Sign Language. Shape, position, and especially context are important to the meaning, so it can get confusing quickly if you don't know all the rules of the language.
    • This is the believed origin of the word "barbarian". The ancient Greeks thought all non-Greeks' language just sounded like "bar-bar" -- babytalk -- and therefore gave them a name to reflect that.

Now go Smurf off!

  1. ↑ including one notable instance instance parodying Cambronne's Last Stand
  2. ↑ seeing
  3. ↑ words
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