So new it squeaks under your shoes.
Time to break it in a little, I suppose. I’m not thinking clearly enough right now, so I think I’ll make a list of things. Lists are theoretically easier to write than paragraphs, so maybe I can trick my mind into producing something.
1. Right now I’m a little irked because I tried Google Docs, and (whether it was through some absentminded flub of my own or Google’s insidious advance on my privacy) I now have an unasked for Google Docs icon sitting amongst my other icons on my taskbar. Puzzling and perturbing…
2. I’m listening to Gnarl’s Barkley’s Necromancer right now. I thought this song contained the lyric “I can do a dance that will make the sky cry blood” (which has been flitting about my head for the past few hours), but that’s apparently Storm Coming. I’ll settle for Cee-lo singing “naughty, naughty necrophilia” over and over.
3. I didn’t actually know that his name was Cee-lo, so I asked Leila. She didn’t know either, so I googled Wikipedia. I know that using google as a verb when you’re not using Google is something of faux pax, but I’m hedging my bets that one day when Google is a distant memory my great grandkids will still use google as their verb of choice when searching. I’m only a first adopter in terms of language.
4. Is there a word for when a product name becomes so universally associated with an object that it becomes synonymous with that object? Like how kleenex is mouthbreather for tissue. I think there is, Leila isn’t sure, Wikipedia doesn’t seem to turn anything up. Anyway, I think it’s an interesting phenomenon, even if I can’t think what it’s called. Maybe it doesn’t have a name yet, and I need to think of one.
5. I’ve always wanted to propagate the use of plasmic as a synonym for fine. This is a very obscure reference to a Zits comic that no one remembers except for me. Hey! Someone on Urban Dictionary seems to have included it. Although I don’t remember Jeremy saying it meant cool or awesome…
6. I’m so in love with how flexible language is. You can make new words, phrases, meanings. Everything in the world affects language, and it changes so much from year to year but it’s always just a thriving, twisting, great awesome thing. This is the nerdiest love I have, and I’m getting it out there now because it’s going to something I’ll probably babble about more later.
7. Your Rocky Spine is a great song. I downloaded an album called Seriously West Coast!, Volume 1 from a Canadian newspaper’s website because it was free and I happened to like Barenaked Ladies. I’ve liked Barenaked Ladies ever since I was about…seven or eight. My brother Sam was a fan, and I think they had a song that mentioned Star Wars. This sort of thing will endear a band indefinitely to mine geeky heart. I even like One Week. If enjoying Canadian rock-rap is wrong, I don’t want to be right ever again. Anyway, Seriously West Coast!, besides having a fantastically terrible name, has a few good songs and I don’t regret downloading it. I think the free download period is over, or I’d link for your enjoyment.
8 . Leila thinks my title for this entry doesn’t make any sense. I’m not in the mood to care, so it stays.
9. My roommate and his father are back now. I think this is a sign that I should publish this thing and skedaddle.
Now to see what this looks like once it’s posted…
I <3 you Valamity!
Did you invent the word mouthbreather?
And I thought it was early adopter, not first.
But I will start using the word plasmic just for you.
(If nobody else comments on these, god knows I certainly will.)
I know that using google as a verb when you’re not using Google is something of faux pax, but I’m hedging my bets that one day when Google is a distant memory my great grandkids will still use google as their verb of choice when searching.
Or they’ll use ‘grep’… with appropriate arguments.
5. I like Zits but I can’t say I’ve ever read the word plasmic before. “Fine” sounds better!
6. Flexibility is amazing, but I’m always a bit angry when all the cool new words I make up don’t catch on.
8. It makes sense if you think about it in a new floor kind of context…
Regarding no4, I think they simply call it Genericised Trademark: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Genericized_trademark
There was an interesting article in my local paper recently about the phenomenon actually.
you srsly havent heard ‘mouthbreather’ before leia????
my dad told me he learned to stop calling tissues kleenex from david lettermen. (really.) he managed to ingrain this in me till i was about 17 about which time i started doing a lot of drugs & went back to kleenex. but i really do think its one of the great unrecorded crimes of our time & often feel guilty about contributing to it.
i was going to leave a comment on yr (leia’s) lj saying “I HIT IT BUT THEN I QUIT IT” to be funny but i like it so im not going to do that & im going to favorite it instead. all i ask is that you
LIKE ME TOO,
howard
Maybe I should have stuck with Gwel. I have this feeling there’s a ‘who’s Brendan?’ floating around in a couple minds. Or more. Not that I care. :O
Also clean floors (like, the shiny ones!) squeak when they’re clean. It works! It’s one of those awesome statements that doesn’t have to make sense because it gets the idea across as well as planting some kind of imagery. Impressionistic writing!
4. I think it’s a form of metonymy — “a figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is closely associated.” (American Heritage Dictionary’s definition)