one of many reasons castiel spent the first year of knowing dean trying not to strangle him: dean’s weird little winchester-only dialect
i’m fucking obsessed with this right now, so buckle in for a meta. a cool fun (horrible) thing about dean’s dialogue is that a good 90% of what comes out of his mouth is:
- a pop culture reference (“you’re just gonna take some divine bong hit, and shazam, you’re roma downey?”)
- references to real life phenomenon (“i don’t wanna wake up missing a kidney in a bathtub full of ice” “try new mexico, i hear he’s on a tortilla”)
- these also often take the form of nicknames, and dean has a tendency to give people nicknames in general or call them something besides their given name, whether it’s affectionate or rude (“easy there, van damme” “so i’m girl interrupted” furthermore castiel = cas, ezekiel = zeke, etc, see also frequent use of “chucklehead” “asshat” and on the nicer/endearments end “buddy” “pal” “sunshine” etc)
- an idiom (“a snowball’s chance” “if it smells like a duck…”)
- slang (“drinking the koolaid” “jonesing for some hooch” not to mention the literal endless amount of words dean uses to refer to killing - gank, waste, juice, ice, etc)
- a metaphor (“power up your batteries” “fly me back to my page on the calendar”)
- a euphemism (“cloud seeding” “i’d have given you an hour alone with her first”)
- sarcasm (his habit of replying “peachy” or “super” when asked how he is)
- wordplay (see: the entire “vampirate” and “werepire” debacles)
- completely nonsensical (guessing what happened to a magical artifact: “it was dug up by tomb raiders? it was seized by the king of the dead by warlords?”)
- said at lightning speed - if you pay attention, dean actually talks a LOT, usually a mile a minute (this makes me feel a way when you recall his year of mutism at age 4 but that’s another post)
- slang IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE (casual usage of “guano,” etc)
- a lie, a deflection, a joke, etc
- or worse, something dean’s NOT saying, deliberately, because he’s one of the most repressed people on earth
the end result of all this being:
dean winchester is utterly infuckingcomprehensible.
think about this. there’s an ENTIRE SECTION on EVERY SINGLE EPISODE PAGE of the spn wiki devoted to JUST explaining dean’s pop culture references, because the average viewer won’t have seen everything he’s talking about either. they have a whole page for this called “hunter’s lingo,” but honestly, it’s not all hunters, just sam and dean’s fucking batshit communication style. even i don’t understand dean half the time. SAM gets it, sam speaks it back to dean a lot in the early seasons, but that’s because sam and dean are 1. practically two halves of the same person 2. FREAKS. every time we get an episode that involves outsider POV is devoted to them going “what the fuck is WRONG with them?”
enter castiel. technically speaking, the show implies that angels are omnilingual. castiel should understand every language known to man, but knowing the meaning of words doesn’t help him understand the following:
- pop culture references
- references to real life phenomenon
- nicknames
- idioms
- slang
- metaphors
- euphemisms
- sarcasm
- wordplay
- you get the idea.
listen to me. look me in the eyes. castiel cannot understand a single fucking word that comes out of dean’s mouth. my guy laid a hand on dean winchester in hell and immediately fell in love with him and has no fucking idea what he’s talking about ever. because not only is dean winchester’s way of speaking CLINICALLY insane, and sometimes incomprehensible even to other human beings who are not sam, castiel is an angel, and someone prone to taking things even more literally than other angels do
go back and watch and watch seasons 4-5 especially. the reason cas does so much squinting and head tilting is because every time dean opens his mouth castiel has to open up his mental “dean winchester dictionary” and translate entire paragraphs on the fly, because again, dean never shuts up!
what makes this extra hilarious to me is this gem:
this line is from 5.13. at this point cas has known dean for AN ENTIRE YEAR AND A HALF. what you see here is my guy SNAPPING. cas made an EFFORT in this scene. he asked who glenn close was. he’s telling dean that he can’t understand him. he is doing his level best to have a normal conversation with this guy he has a crush on and for the life of him he cannot do it (equal but opposite energy to cas blowing up the gas station and motel room in 4.01, tbh)
yes, cas can understand dean’s tone. he can use context clues, and he usually gets the general idea. and when cas DOES understand dean’s jokes, he laughs at them. the first time we ever see him smile is during their 4.07 heart-to-heart when dean says “it was a witch, not the tet offensive.” since cas has knowledge of human history, he knows what the tet offensive is; he got the joke, and he laughed.
but as far as actual dialogue goes, he consistently struggles to keep up. even after metatron gives castiel the pop culture knowledge in season 9, cas struggles to put it to put it to proper use (dean: “you wanna just walk right into the death star?” cas: “what does a fictional battle station have to do with this?”). whenever he asks dean to clarify it’s always when he’s most annoyed, like most of the time he knows it would be futile but he’s too annoyed to care. (dean: “i don’t know who’s on first, what’s on second!” cas: “what IS second???”) i’m pretty sure he spends seasons 4-6 wanting to shake dean by the shoulders and ask him why he is LIKE THIS.
it takes cas - who, again, is omnilingual - YEARS to begin to acclimate to dean’s speech and start speaking that language back to him. it’s season 8 before we start really hearing him use slang, season 9 before he begins to understand wordplay, season 10 before he starts using pop culture references (to other angels, who immediately fail to understand him, which disappoints him immensely), and season 11 before he really gets into metaphors. i don’t remember what season he started using “yeah” instead of “yes” but i do know it took a really damn long time.
and honestly, i don’t think cas truly got the hang of it until at least season 11-12. that’s something like 7 or 8 YEARS. it’s more than half the time they’ve known each other at the point of the series finale.
so what’s true romance, fellas? it’s falling completely and totally in love with the most inexplicable person you will ever meet in your whole 4.5 billion year life, even though you have yet to understand a single thing he’s ever said to you. thank you for coming to my ted talk
@marcusantonius sums it up best
