I just want to point out, behind you there's a crazy crowd of people waving, and I can't help but remember yesterday when Blake Shelton was here and he looked out the window, and sure enough it was crickets. If not, 10 years from now the team will be playing to the sound of crickets in their new, empty stadium. The Gophers marketing department is going to have to find a way to make inroads with the younger crowd. Ooh, I hear crickets now.Īt the Loews Theaters at Roosevelt Field last weekend during the opening of 'X2,' one could hear the sound of > crickets in the deafening silence that followed the preview for 'The Hulk,' while during 'The Matrix Reloaded' clapping and cheering nearly drowned out the preview for the futuristic saga, the Goliath of the summer season.Ĭrickets has also evolved from meaning the silence of an assembled crowd to a more generalized quiet, expressing the lack of any interest or response: How many do you think this is a great idea? A show of applause. How about a show of applause, so the audience at home can hear. He describes it as the audience getting so quiet “you can hear crickets” on the stage. There’s always the possibility that he’ll bomb.

This silence was very often the specific sound of an audience that is not clapping, understood as disapproval: Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer, Agnes and the Hitman, 2007 There was a silence long enough to hear crickets in, and Agnes thought, If he makes some crack about me being not little, I'm gonna hit him again, and then he spoke. If I knew the sound a black hole makes, I would have typed that, because there’s not much worth saving on the alphabet network. In early uses, explicit reference to the sound of crickets is juxtaposed with silence:Ĭhirp. The descriptive nature of the sound of crickets immediately conveys something very specific, so it is no surprise that a figurative use of crickets has developed. CRICKETS CHIRP or whatever it is crickets do.

Here’s an excerpt from the script for Gothika, a film starring Halle Berry made in 2003:ĮXT. ( Tumbleweeds is also sometimes used in this figurative way). Over time, crickets became an image used not just in writing but cinematic shorthand for quiet country locations, sometimes used to stand for a generalized sense of open emptiness. In its most recent extended use, 'crickets' has become a word for 'silence.'

Cricket sounds