The Chonker is a comprehensive dictionary for PangaeaPanga and Raysfire’s lingo.
This is how The Chonker came to be.
On the r/pangaeapanga subreddit, I once saw this dictionary, which back then had something like four pages? Three? It was small either way, so I regularly left comments with suggestions for new entries, until the giant new 8-page update came out. I realised that the idea of a lingo dictionary had much more potential than this document, so I copied it into a spreadsheet, and added new entries, examples and references almost daily.
Panga mentioned once that he took over the habit of pronouncing ‘block’ with a dark ‘o’ from Raysfire, so I started checking his channel out too, to see how related their lingo would be. And it yielded tons of new terms that I happily kept track of in the spreadsheet.
It got very large, but it remained structured, because I consistently adhered to a small set of rules.
The Chonker is made up of two parts:
- the spreadsheet, which contains the raw data;
- the Python script, which converts it to a website.
The main spreadsheet has a simple structure. Each row is one term; a cell can be either of four things:
- a term (always & only the first column)
- an example
- a meaning
- an internal reference
Furthermore, in a cell, there can be:
- a context (a set of parenthesis at the beginning of a cell or after a semicolon)
- a tilde (to replace the term; I saw this in a real dictionary and it’s super useful)
- a separator (only before an example or a meaning)
- an external reference (a YouTube ID + timestamp)
This spreadsheet can be exported to a TSV file and this is then fed into the Python script.
With the help of a Python script – and surprisingly few errors along the way, because I’m a cracked programmer – I converted the TSV file into an HTML file. Some interesting regular expressions were also necessary to convert e.g. the external references.
The original name, PangaeaPanga Dictionary, became stale. (To be frank, it was already boring, though descriptive.) With all the new Raysfire lingo added in, it needed a more creative name. I thought about Dictionary for the Fans or The Juicer, but these didn’t make it: the first one was boring, and using ‘juicer’ would interfere with the actual, frequently used meaning, and that isn’t desirable.
Eventually, I settled on The Chonker. ‘Chonker’ had then appeared once in a Panga video (that’s a chonker, dude). It is immediately clear what it means – it’s a derivative of ‘chonky’ (huge) – and it the term isn’t used that often by our bois. In any case, using ‘the’ made it distinctive enough.
I registered thechonker.fans because I noticed the .fans domain, and it was the same price as a .com – couldn’t let that opportunity slide. With the definitive article, for consistency.
Thanks to u/Garlicboy101 for the original concept of a dictionary for PangaeaPanga lingo. The Chonker would not have existed without your work.
I should also either thank or blame Raysfire for this, as he has often mentioned that someone should really put together a dictionary of lingo. One post on the r/Raysfire subreddit, which showcased and explained six terms, reached the weekly top and therefore the Reddit recap, where Raysfire said he was going to ‘critique these definitions’. If you have time for The Chonker, Rays – well, you’re probably going to fully read it out of interest anyway – I would much appreciate some devastating feedback; don’t spare me.
If you have any suggestions for new entries, share them with me! Although I watch all Super Mario Maker 2 videos by Raysfire and PangaeaPanga, a YouTube link is appreciated. In addition to the main tab of the spreadsheet, I also have a secondary tab with pending entries – about 200 at the moment. Most of them have only occurred once; some of them are hard to describe and are only on there for procrastination reasons.
The general guideline is: if the term has appeared in two separate videos, it gets added. This will make sure that the term is remembered, which makes it more likely to settle into the permanent lingo. This avoids littering the dictionary with single-use terms.
You are allowed to use this work under a CC-BY-SA licence. Just don’t be a gremlin and respect the work of others.