Anywhere you go, I'll follow you...
Jun. 20th, 2003 09:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ventaHmmm.
This morning, on the way to work with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ao_lai, I observed that there was a left-hand, leather, but sadly not laceless, boot sitting by itself on the pavement. He remarked that the Bedstead Men were probably to blame.
When I'm talking (or occasionally when I'm writing), I tend to sling in random lines of songs, poems, bits of film dialgoue. Not for any real reason, I just like playing with words. And if you do that, it's nice to know that the people you're talking to have picked them up.
Not, as some people would have you believe, because I derive a feeling of smug intellectual superiority in knowing that my friends have read the same book as me, or what have you. More because it's like the mental equivalent of snap.
But, if you hear someone quoting something, there remains the problem of how to make it known that you noticed. Now, ideally you do this by making some witty remark, which adds something to the conversation, and isn't exclusive of people who didn't pick it up. So, what if there isn't such a remark, or (more probably, in my case :) you can't think of it ?
Do you just let the thing go ? If someone's worked a reference in particularly cleverly, it seems churlish not to acknowledge it... maybe I just lack the wit for the game :)
This morning, on the way to work with
ao_lai, I observed that there was a left-hand, leather, but sadly not laceless, boot sitting by itself on the pavement. He remarked that the Bedstead Men were probably to blame.When I'm talking (or occasionally when I'm writing), I tend to sling in random lines of songs, poems, bits of film dialgoue. Not for any real reason, I just like playing with words. And if you do that, it's nice to know that the people you're talking to have picked them up.
Not, as some people would have you believe, because I derive a feeling of smug intellectual superiority in knowing that my friends have read the same book as me, or what have you. More because it's like the mental equivalent of snap.
But, if you hear someone quoting something, there remains the problem of how to make it known that you noticed. Now, ideally you do this by making some witty remark, which adds something to the conversation, and isn't exclusive of people who didn't pick it up. So, what if there isn't such a remark, or (more probably, in my case :) you can't think of it ?
Do you just let the thing go ? If someone's worked a reference in particularly cleverly, it seems churlish not to acknowledge it... maybe I just lack the wit for the game :)
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Re: gene/meme
Date: 2003-06-20 09:27 am (UTC)Nice.
You can still perform the analogy, with the meme being "wanting to throw a carrot at the speaker due to having seen someone else do similar in the past". Specifically, I suppose that the meme then is the memory of having seen someone react in a particular way to a particular situation. Other memes (such as "people often take offence at having a carrot thrown at them") might then affect or suppress the action of the first meme. But at this stage I think it's clear that the analogy to genetics is being stretched purely for the sake of it :-)