Mindy Kaling was on Charlie Rose, talking about upcoming “The Mindy Project” episodes

The inside joke about the Sploderzz execs and one of the docs all being Dartmouth grads is that Mindy Kaling herself is an alumna. Nobody from Dartmouth would, as the characters do, refer to each other as “fellow D-bags”, however. I was there twenty years before Mindy, when we still used the full term “douche-bag”, to describe as you can imagine, an undesirable. The thing about “wah-hoo-wah” was accurate — she deliberately botches the pitch of it — although fittingly, the term is considered uncouth in some groups because it allegedly refers, in Native American languages, to a vulgar reference to “vagina”.
Hearty wah-hoo-wah to Mindy and her “purrr-oject”.
Comment by markweiss86 – April 2, 2014 11:40 AM PDT REPLY TO THIS POST

I posted the above on a pretty well-traveled site about television. TV Line by Kimberly Roots. I was seeing, via the search-injuns, if anyone else with a type-pad caught the weird Dartmouthisms on the Tuesday, April 1, 2014 episode of “The Mindy Project”, starring Dartmouth alumna Mindy Kaling.

In my day people might refer to someone as a douche-bag, but probably not to his face. I remember hearing a story about a guy on the ski team, Miles DeChamp ’87 going to a ski-team party Halloween wearing a large green garbage bag and then telling everyone including his coach (John Morton?) that he was dressed as that coach (Morty), who he was calling a “douche-bag”. But he could rock that because Miles was a total stud (all-league in soccer, NCAA champ in downhill skiing, giant slalom, tall, handsome, and from Sweden, perhaps royal blood ) and Morton, if that was the target, was not a douche-bag, was a war hero and a great coach.

I could fathom that the nature of language and slang is that “douche-bag” could evolve to “d-bag” but I doubt it would lose its edge and become benign, like Mindy’s characters calling each other “fellow D-bags”. I doubt Dartmouth alumni call each other “d-bags”. But it’s funny for her show, I guess, to pretend that we do. (It’s more like the ski champ calling his coach a “douche” in that she doesn’t really mean it).

I also liked the three Dartmouth characters doing some little “wah-hoo-wah” cheer, hands-in like during a basketball time-out. I’ve never done that. I still use the term as a compliment, as in “hearty wah-hoo-wah to Mindy for her show”.

I presume that a lot of people don’t use the term at all for various reasons. (And I do not use the term Indians to describe the Dartmouth Big Green teams or athletes; I actually once went to Michael Dorris’s office hours to discuss whether Dartmouth Mohegans would be any better, and wrote a column in the D about that; but I still sometimes use “wah-hoo-wah”).

Somewhere I read that among its other problems that in some languages “wah-hoo-wah” is slang for “vagina”, in the way that some people say the same about the word “squaw”, but I cannot find, even in the infinite internet, the reference.

I am tempted (and this is real insider stuff) to write and star in a one-act play called “Mindy and Brenda” about how Mindy Kaling’s success is actually due to a deus ex machina event wherein the script for “The Mindy Project” falls from heaven, along with something called “Matt and Ben”, and that is how she has gotten this far. (I saw “Matt and Ben” off-Broadway and met she and her producing partners — Brenda Withers and Jason Hsaio,  at the time, 2003 — it was pretty ingenious and hilarious).

Chop Keenan, the Palo Alto real estate tycoon and presumed overlord of the presumed political machine –and self-proclaimed “Parking Czar” — here, sent his son to Dartmouth. The one time I was introduced to him, briefly, at City Hall, by Nancy Shepherd, I was wearing a Dartmouth wind-breaker and he said “Dartmouth, huh? What’s your favorite tribe of Indians?” and supplicant that I am I says “the Wah-hoo-wahs” which is a perfect example of the idea that politics is like tacos and you should never look too closely at how they’re made, speaking of wah-hoo-wahs. Chop’s business partner also went to Dartmouth, and if they ever sell me the Varsity Theatre (me and my thousands of hypothetical partners), I will try to book the opening night with an all-Green talent lineup. Not necessarily Mindy Kaling, Aisha Tyler and Rachel Dratch doing stand-up, but maybe Ramona Falls, careful, Warm Weather and Tweed Funk, with Austin Willacy.

Getting back to one more point about Mindy (by the way, what is her real name?), I got a kick out of something she presumably put into “The Office” about making fun of Cornell and name-dropping the former Paly football star Nathan Ford, who went on to Ivy greatness in Ithaca. I’ve said somewhere: I must be the only person on the planet who saw Nathan Ford throw behind the runner and “Matt and Ben” off-Broadway — Ford basically blew the CCS championship baseball game Wilcox v. Paly, 2-0 I think, because he tried to pick off a runner and made a throwing error. He was a catcher and threw the ball into center field, behind the runner instead of waiting for a potential steal of third, which would be ahead of the runner.

A little more sussing, and it filters up that the matter of the “wah-hoo-wah” is more meaty and more serious than the “d-bag” gag — even on April Fools Day. Here is the lyric from the famous song-poem from Richard Hovey, class of 1885:

Oh, the big chief that met him was the Sachem of the Wah-hoo-wahs.

If he was not a big chief, there was never one you saw who was.

He had tobacco by the cord; ten squaws and more to come;

But he never yet had tasted of New England rum!

My friends in fraternities — about two-thirds of the men in my day — would probably have had to memorize this. I think the words were printed among other songs and chants in the back of the Freshman Book — our version of a Face Book, or a The Face Book . The song is “Eleazer Wheelock” and is about his famous 500 gallon jug of rum. And the subject of a famous mural that is now concealed.

If Mindy was that much hipper she would be heard, with Bill Hader, shouting “fill the bowl, fill the bowl”.*

Play within play: Mindy Kaling (r) directing Bill Hader (dressed as a bear) in “the Mindy Project”

edit to add or *, making an asterisk of myself: “fill the bowl” would be too  hip by half in that few recognize it as a lyric from the same Wheelock-500 gallon jug of rum song. It is similar to Hovey’s more famous lyric, the Hanover Winter Song, “fill the pipe, pass the bowl” (from which one of Dartmouth’s senior societies, Fire and Skoal, get’s its name) — I am making a Chokalingamian type of faux-Dartmouth joke.  Or as Rosanna Rosannadanna might say: never mind. Ok, I’m a d-bag.