Words, Gadgets, Words, Smells, and a Reference to a Meme

[muninnhuginn]

Dredged from the depths of the morning's incoming tide of spam: The Word Spy's fyborg:

"(FY.bohrg) n. A functional cyborg; an organism that has become a kind of cyborg by extending its senses and abilities using technology."

Nice to see citations for a word with a long pedigree (certainly in the Word Spy annals) tho' not as long as posthuman. Ah, Bruce Sterling (damn his eyes, we couldn't get ourselves to read him for years) and Robert Silverberg.

The test to determine if you've already become a fyborg is fun too. The gadgetry question is the danger, we feel. Too much time spent admiring Dinky Delilah, adding the cool little torch to the clutter on the key ring.... It complements the important items meme (no, we're not going to name it) that we saw in yonmei's journal over here, where, explicitly in the list or implicitly due to the requirements of items on the list, gadgets do rather figure and for some of us at least might creep up the list rather than down.

List of things to value

couldn't live without	Books
^	Bottle of Scent
:	Live Music
:	Recorded Music
:	Irony
:	My Family
:	My Computer
:	The Internet
:	Dancing
:	Tools
:	Boats
:	Pubs
:	Television
:	Cinema
:	Comics
v	Swimming
couldn't care less	Video Games

Your meme, should you choose to accept it, is to rank the following things in order, from "couldn't live without" to "couldn't care less". To add value to this process, you must also add one item to the list - which can be achieved by subdividing an old category if you like - before passing the meme on (including these instructions). You can remove one item too, if you want.

Yup, we added smelly stuff. Mainly in deference to the article in The Village Voice about the naming of fragrances (Scents and sensibility), in which we learned that we aren't the only ones to be seduced by Happy (tho' we've defected to the alternative Happy Heart at present). The naming of something as ephemeral as a commercial fragrance must be oh so tricky. After all, we can't be the only ones to have been repelled by the notion of Happy. Happy? We don't do happy, or hearts. The sample bottle won us over. We'd still rather it was called something a little darker, more evocative of place or of mysterious doings, or of mysterious doings in evocative places. Happy, humph. We only use it therapeutically, really. (Do we protest too much?) (Were it not for the hay fever, we'd love to work in the perfume business. All those smells: like walking into Culpepper's and staying for good. Roughly what we need right now.) There must be such an art to naming these things, beyond mere brand/label identification and on into aspiration keeping a weather eye the while on fashion, knowing all the time that you'll trip up on someone's individual peculiar reactions. For example, as a pedantic southpaw with some French, we see Rive Gauche and think of Paris and simultaneously identfiy gauche as clumsy, awkward, cack-handed. So we won't be buying that one, will we?

Which brings us to the nub of all of his, really: precision and pedantry. The reason we gave up on Mr Sterling for so long was a line in Involution Ocean, or was it Schismatrix, that referred to a noise reaching a crescendo (now that's a name for a scent: man's or woman's, we wonder?). In the context it occurred this could not have meant that the sound reached the point at which its volume began to increase, but could only have been intended to mean that the sound had reached its point of maximum volume. So we abandoned Sterling. A small thing over which to desert a favoured author, but there you go. We did. We've come back, again, still remaining to be convinced. Suffering for our pedantry.

But what a bunch we are ravens and friends of: getting an automated response from Spiegel Online over our correction last night; carefully editing the result text of a quiz (yup, we saw you do it too pickledginger); or (gleefully?) pointing out others' goofs (prufrock). What a crew, huh? It needs a group noun: a pickiness of pedants?

"Why do you blog?" folk sometimes ask.

"It's less effort than sniffing out the local branch of Pedants Anonymous."

Comments

smells...

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Perfume names. Hmmm. I envisage shaded boudoirs, draped in voiles and gauzes, cooled by sea breezes, far from any madding crowd (how very Alma-Tadema). And then something comes out smelling of musk and named Tramp. Then again, maybe that one was named on a late-night walk somewhere? I have a weakness for perfume, am drawn by design and name and label to test, then, if the hint is there of silk-road dust and leaves and jeunesse d'oree, I usually buy. I am presently looking for Guerlain's classic L'Heure Bleu, only for that delicious, alluring, allusive name. A scent for an aspiration, perhaps, or for a fantasised other self? However good it smells, I won't buy if the name does nothing for my inner vie de Boheme.
Parfum de jour: Soleil, by Issey Miyake.

Re: smells...

[muninnhuginn]

I can see the very Alma-Tadema's you might mean! Catalogue from the 1999 Walker exhibition just to hand.

Being frugal by nature, apart from Clinique's very useful samples (I have such a good excuse for regularly buying two products just as they do the gift bags of samples and thereby avoiding buying any lipstick at all, except because I want to, for about ten years), I only use one scent at a time: they do go off and far too quickly. So it's Happy Heart until it's all used up (at several squirts per day, this won't be long). Timed right, it should be about the point at which we reach winter and I head for Aromatics.

Tweed was the one I never got (does it still exist?). Who wants to go around smelling of river water or scratchy woollens?

Re: smells...

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I think Tweed is still out there -- it's one of the classics. Not that I ever cared for it, either -- that name thing again. Oddly, it's only perfumes that work like this for me. I'm untroubled by labels in the usual way. Maybe it's because scents are, in a way, secret -- only I know (unless I choose to tell) what I'm referencing on my pulse points on any given day. And I can conjure myself to places I love with just a dab here and there.

Re: smells...

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I think Tweed is still out there -- it's one of the classics. Not that I ever cared for it, either -- that name thing again. Oddly, it's only perfumes that work like this for me. I'm untroubled by labels in the usual way. Maybe it's because scents are, in a way, secret -- only I know (unless I choose to tell) what I'm referencing on my pulse points on any given day. And I can conjure myself to places I love with just a dab here and there.

"A pickiness of pedants"

[pickledginger.livejournal.com]

I like it!

Also, about that posting of prufrock's:

They printed that?

1) Any editor, or anyone who has ever met an editor, ought to have known better than to let an alleged name like that pass uncontested. At the very least, if they were too lazy or stupid to check it, they should have omitted the suspect translation.

2) Anybody with any education at all, even Sesame Street, in any romance language, ought to have known that wasn't what it meant!

3) And even if they had no one on staff with any language skills, and had no foreign-language dictionaries in-house, haven't they ever heard of Google? Or Babelfish?

Beat them with a pica stick!

Ahem. Yes, I feel much better now - thank you for asking!

Re: "A pickiness of pedants"

[muninnhuginn]

Thought you might just find that amusing! I, too, am boggled that anyone could be that stoopid. At the very least there's good old Babel fish. And then there are real dictionaries. And real people with real knowledge of languages. Sighs.