Sunday, November 15, 2009

May I offer you some Falcon Punch?

Q: Captain Falcon. Meme. Myth. Legend. How do you spell the catchphrase he yells during his signature attack, the Falcon Punch?


Captain Falcon. Punching.

A: To find this, we will need to determine how many o's there ought to be in falcon (FALCOOOOON?) and how many u's in punch (PUUUUUNCH!?). Fortunately, Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics has already detailed the methodology for finding how many times to repeat one character in a single phrase using the example "excuuuuuuuuuuuse me, princess!" - meaning that all that's left to do is to repeat that procedure for two variables. Science! Too bad whoever wrote the Khaaaan! Machine script didn't make something for such an instance, or this would be really easy.

Here's the spreadsheet I used to repeatedly search Google for the phrases "Falcon Punch" through "Falcoooooooooon Puuuuuuuuuunch," and here is the lovely Excel graph those results yielded:



This graph is . . . not so good. "Falcon Punch" dominates everything else, and there's a slight bump for "Falcooon Punch," which, at the time I searched for it, had 9,230 results. Also, Excel insists on color-coding the z-axis.

why must you mock me, Clippy

Let's see what the graph looks like when we ignore everything above 1000.



A-ha! Besides the abundance of boring results that insist on a single O in FALCON or a single U in PUNCH, there are two clear peaks. One, FALCOOOOOON PUUUUUUUUNCH, is from repeated copying of a Pokemon theme parody (gotta smash 'em all, etc.), and hence does not count. The other, FALCOOON PUUUUNCH, is a heterogeneous mixture of Smash Brothers fans, meme repeaters, and writers of crossover fanfiction. This, like the FALCOOON PUNCH spike, is a genuine result.

In conclusion: please spare yourself the indignity of spelling this exclamation as "FALCON PUNCH!" Instead, choose either the popular "FALCOOON PUNCH!" or the overenthusiastic "FALCOOON PUUUUNCH!" I leave it to your discretion whether to substitute for PUNCH "PAWNCH" (half as popular as PUNCH) or "PAUNCH" (one quarter as popular).

also how can there be only one result for "falcooon brunch" I mean come on

1 comment:

  1. Finally, your two loves (Smash Bros. and answering questions) have finally come together. It's like a less edible Reese's Cup.

    P.S. Volt = Bergdoll

    ReplyDelete