![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
11) It would take more than three days for moles to tunnel through evilhippo's entire height.
12) Evilhippo is apparently responsible for making Tycho Brahe the easiest early astronomer for her to remember.
13) Ancient Chinese artists probably didn't paint evilhippo because she was the voice of their conscience.
Do you think you pronounce both o's in evilhippoomancy? Would I be allowed to teach it at Hogwarts?
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.
Ten Top Trivia Tips about Evilhippo!
- The state nickname of Iowa is 'The evilhippo state'.
- Evilhippoomancy is the art of telling the future with evilhippo.
- Until the 1960s, evilhippo was not allowed to enter Disneyland.
- Baskin Robbins once made evilhippo flavoured ice cream!
- Evilhippo can pollinate up to six times more efficiently than the honeybee!
- Evilhippo is 984 feet tall.
- Ancient Chinese artists would never paint pictures of evilhippo!
- Moles are able to tunnel through 300 feet of evilhippo in a day.
- Marie Antoinette never said 'let them eat cake' - this is a mistranslation of 'let them eat evilhippo'.
- A sixteenth century mathematician lost his nose in a duel over his love for evilhippo, and wore a silver replacement for the rest of his life.
11) It would take more than three days for moles to tunnel through evilhippo's entire height.
12) Evilhippo is apparently responsible for making Tycho Brahe the easiest early astronomer for her to remember.
13) Ancient Chinese artists probably didn't paint evilhippo because she was the voice of their conscience.
Do you think you pronounce both o's in evilhippoomancy? Would I be allowed to teach it at Hogwarts?
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.)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
no subject
As for 'Soda'... up here in western Canada, it's pop. Everything is pop. In restaurants you 'change the pop machine' or 'the pop is out' when it goes flat. You want bottled water, you go to the pop machine. If it's a sealed beverage and available in a vending machine, you go to "get a pop" even if it's not pop. If you mention 'soda' you get soda water, nasty stuff. Sort of like how I've heard if I order "iced tea" in the States, I get cold tea XD; which is not what it is up here.
From:
no subject
Where I'm from in Ohio it's pretty much the same situation. I started making a distinction between the two to be obstinate, and so I wouldn't get caught up in the arguments between the soda and pop people that happened all the time when I first got to college. (It's amazing how rabid people can be over the two.) Then there's other confusion... like these two girls who came into the movie theatre where I worked over the winter break and asked me "Is a 'soft drink' pop?" And now that I think about it... I never went to check the "soda syrup" at work. Maybe I just use the two interchangeably, leaning more toward pop if it's sealed and in a bottle/glass/whatever. Though grape... grape is almost always soda. I think I could sit here making random distinctions forever... I'm probably just going by what sounds best to me. At least it's less confusing than calling everything coke.
There's iced tea that isn't cold? How does that work? I know there's sweet tea, and it's something that's only done right in the southern US, and people complain about that, but iced tea that isn't cold...? (-:
From:
no subject
I call things soda and pop though and no one know where it came from. XD Especially since I have a very distinct Frozen State (like Wisconsin) accent when I say "soda." Which doesn't even make sense, since that's a "pop" area (originally typo-ed as "poop").
I'm going to bed now.
From:
no subject
There are... different accents for "soda"? I'm gonna have to look into this now. The only one I'm coming up with is "sou da", but we all know that's just my brain going "is that so?" in Japanese. Because no one would say it that way and mean pop, I don't think (and that's one of the few things my brain knows in Japanese, and therefore it's very entertained by it and preparing for potential puns).