Notes, Notings, and Common Refrains

This video (or the writer/s thereof) claim to have found the final, true, answer, based on mathematical proof. Do you agree?



Discuss (Seriously: I'm comment-hungry this week).

...As you can probably tell from where I put my emphasis tag, I don't agree, entirely (though I do think this is a plausible step in the correct direction). As someone who has lived well-steeped in the Humanities, rather than the S.T.E.M. fields, I can think of a few different ways to interpret why certain words pair with "geek" rather than "nerd."

Also: I'd seen the M.I.T. origin of "nerd" (as the backward spelling of "drunk") over at Etymology Online. But this is the first discussion of "nerd" I've seen that doesn't even mention Dr. Seuss...

A childhood memory popped into my head, some time around midnight:

When I was little,* I had one of those genre books "Great Big Pop-up Books Of..." This was a pop-up book of riddles, and all the riddles were the silly punning, sort.

And this is one of two riddles that I remember from that book:

Q: What do you get when you cross a crocodile with a head of lettuce?

( A: )



*Not sure precisely how little... But it was before our family moved from the suburbs of New Jersey (two hours?) north to the quasi-rural woodlands of the Mid-Hudson region of New York. So I must've been younger than six-and-a-half.

Just a word or two on word choices (because it's something I've been thinking about, these past few weeks, and that's what these journal thingies are for, right?):

There are those (many, most, nearly all, maybe I'm the odd one out...) who see words like "crippled" and "lame" to refer to people with physical (especially mobility-related) disabilities as unequivocally derogatory, like the N# word, or the R# word.

A year and a bit ago, when I started collecting folktales and other pre-modern literature featuring disabilities, I knew I was going to come across these two particular words a lot. And I had a decision to make: do I reproduce these words faithfully, as they appear in the original (or translations of the original)? Or should I bowlderize them, and replace the offending words with "Mobility impaired," "couldn't/can't walk," etc.

Now, as an English Major, and lover of the Humanities, I can't abide bowlderization. ...after all, the words are part of the history, and the history is part of the understanding, and understanding is crucial to finding justice.

So I made a conscious decision to keep those words in each story as I find them.

And after that, I found I was no longer offended by the words themselves, but only as they've ended up being used in the generations through which I've lived (yes, by now, I've lived through multiple generations -- I'm surprised by this, too).

Used as a simple descriptive word for human being who crawls more easily than s/he/ou walks upright, "crippled" (from the same root as "creep," and "crawl") is no more derogatory than "Wheelchair-" or "Crutch-User") --

Except this same word has been used extensively (or even mostly) to refer to things that aren't even human -- an example:

"The wide-spread power outage on the East Coast today crippled Internet trading, and the Stock Market fell seventy points."

So, then, the word, which once was used as a simple descriptor (even self-descriptor) in literature of the past, has become "Dehumanizing" because it's been used to describe every thing that's ever been broken. And people are not things, and people don't break (in the same way cars do).

So -- in light of that, I've decided to refer to myself as "crippled" and/or "lame," because, by their first meanings, that's what I am. I will, however, take a ten-mile word detour (if I have to) to avoid applying either of these words to any abstract thing (like the stock market, or Government) or inanimate object.

Does this make any sense?

1. Similes and Metaphors: You know, "Simile" is one of my favorite forms of wordplay. They're a fantastic way to world-build and reveal character in a single line. I mean, a wandering minstrel character from a pseudo-medieval world would not describe the croaking of frogs to a voice heard through a crackly radio. But a carnival barker from the twentieth century might.
   
   One of my favorite games to play, when I'm stuck someplace like the DMV, or the checkout line at a store, is to focus on a detail or two around me, and think up different similes for them, based on the sort of character who would make each sort of comparison (how would a painter describe that fluorescent light? How would a werewolf? Etc.)
   
   I'm trying to construct a "30 days of similes" meme, and write it in such a way that is not ableist toward people with sensory perception differences. It's hard.
   
   
2. Odd words that Google Chrome's spell-checker doesn't recognize:
   
   It gets "Herman Melville," but not "Pequod" or "Moby"
   
   It fails to recognize "Googol," ffs.
   
   Also, all the HTML coding, like "blockquote."

I was going to write more, but I'm starting to drift to sleep as I sit here, and type up fully pretend words in my sleep. So i'd better go...