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Today I had two classes. I sat in one learning about the various ways in which culture spreads, and how your language is affected by your parents, but your dialect and accent come from your peers. Then all the interesting ways people divide themselves up into little groups. I kept my mouth shut on fandom and whatnot, but I know before the end of the quarter I'll have to bring it into play. And most of the pretentious sillies in there who know what their majors are will just sort of stare at me a bit, and I'll have to explain. But there's definitely a fandom dialect, and selection for ideas. Not to mention the glaringly obvious ways of tracking memes (in the cultural evolution sense, rather than random-quiz sense.)
Ah, this will be your PSA for tonight. Memes? The name comes from Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene (which I just discovered was written in 1976... a lot longer ago than I thought. Yay, wikipedia.) It's pronounced to rhyme with "cream" and is actually a small bit of information selected for its ease of copying, kind of like an information virus. It's kind of an interesting concept, even if it doesn't exactly work in practice (since information that's not easy to copy still persists better than false information that's easy to copy). Also, I think it's worth noting the amusing way the word meme is a meme of its own that's sort of run off into totally unrelated territory. I'm willing to bet its current use on the internet started with usenet, though. I should see if I could prove it. I wonder if I can finagle that into being part of my final paper for that class this quarter... probably not.
( Things are made better with random examples stolen from shaykreth. )
I'm also a little worried that my dialect's getting injured here. I was walking from Walgreens (where they had no plastic snakes or dinosaurs. There are no words for my disappointment. And my shopping list should have been more thorough... I forgot sponges.) over to the Co-op to grab some of the things I'd forgotten when I was there Monday, and thought to myself "Hmm... I should pick up some soda." I would have mentally corrected myself had I not immediately wondered if my dialect was broken. I guess it sort of works if I explain I was thinking specifically about buying Squirt... and since I make a distinction, it's a lot more like soda than Coke and such (which is always pop. Dark carbonated beverages are pop when they don't come from a fountain. From a fountain everything's soda.) I'm starting to think that this is becoming a problem because soda is just a prettier word than pop. I select heavily for prettier words.
Anyway, I obviously set this up wrong when I started writing. Two classes... right. The other, now, was my English class. Which is really more of a comp lit class. And, I guess just to fly in the face of almost every other non-BS class I've had here, it actually makes me happy. No, really... the people in it are cool, and we got to spend an hour and a half in the Reg's special collections looking at 250-year-old picture books full of etchings of Roman ruins and not discussing them so much as talking about them. I mean, we read something for last week and sat in class talking about the guy's "protracted freak-out" over one of the paintings he was describing. The language people use to talk about things makes such a huge difference. And this is a laid-back class where (gasp!) people are laid-back because they're cool, and not because they don't care to actually do the reading. It is, of course, full of English majors. Silly English majors.
Oh, and in the 18th century the cool thing to do, if you were well-off enough to do it, was to have ruins reconstructed in your garden. This really confused my instructor (who isn't a full professor and thus doesn't want to be called one). I, on the other hand, think this would be really cool. If I'm ever rich enough to be randomly eccentric, it's totally something I'd do. I mean, the books even had measurements. I'd be so easy to re-create some of the ruins of Palmyra or wherever as they were in 1750 or so. And that'd be awesome.
(And ah-HA, this is the other song I was looking for for my random Songs About California list. There are actually quite a few in my library, for a reason that had nothing to do with conscious choice.)
Ah, this will be your PSA for tonight. Memes? The name comes from Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene (which I just discovered was written in 1976... a lot longer ago than I thought. Yay, wikipedia.) It's pronounced to rhyme with "cream" and is actually a small bit of information selected for its ease of copying, kind of like an information virus. It's kind of an interesting concept, even if it doesn't exactly work in practice (since information that's not easy to copy still persists better than false information that's easy to copy). Also, I think it's worth noting the amusing way the word meme is a meme of its own that's sort of run off into totally unrelated territory. I'm willing to bet its current use on the internet started with usenet, though. I should see if I could prove it. I wonder if I can finagle that into being part of my final paper for that class this quarter... probably not.
( Things are made better with random examples stolen from shaykreth. )
I'm also a little worried that my dialect's getting injured here. I was walking from Walgreens (where they had no plastic snakes or dinosaurs. There are no words for my disappointment. And my shopping list should have been more thorough... I forgot sponges.) over to the Co-op to grab some of the things I'd forgotten when I was there Monday, and thought to myself "Hmm... I should pick up some soda." I would have mentally corrected myself had I not immediately wondered if my dialect was broken. I guess it sort of works if I explain I was thinking specifically about buying Squirt... and since I make a distinction, it's a lot more like soda than Coke and such (which is always pop. Dark carbonated beverages are pop when they don't come from a fountain. From a fountain everything's soda.) I'm starting to think that this is becoming a problem because soda is just a prettier word than pop. I select heavily for prettier words.
Anyway, I obviously set this up wrong when I started writing. Two classes... right. The other, now, was my English class. Which is really more of a comp lit class. And, I guess just to fly in the face of almost every other non-BS class I've had here, it actually makes me happy. No, really... the people in it are cool, and we got to spend an hour and a half in the Reg's special collections looking at 250-year-old picture books full of etchings of Roman ruins and not discussing them so much as talking about them. I mean, we read something for last week and sat in class talking about the guy's "protracted freak-out" over one of the paintings he was describing. The language people use to talk about things makes such a huge difference. And this is a laid-back class where (gasp!) people are laid-back because they're cool, and not because they don't care to actually do the reading. It is, of course, full of English majors. Silly English majors.
Oh, and in the 18th century the cool thing to do, if you were well-off enough to do it, was to have ruins reconstructed in your garden. This really confused my instructor (who isn't a full professor and thus doesn't want to be called one). I, on the other hand, think this would be really cool. If I'm ever rich enough to be randomly eccentric, it's totally something I'd do. I mean, the books even had measurements. I'd be so easy to re-create some of the ruins of Palmyra or wherever as they were in 1750 or so. And that'd be awesome.
(And ah-HA, this is the other song I was looking for for my random Songs About California list. There are actually quite a few in my library, for a reason that had nothing to do with conscious choice.)
