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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 ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
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.
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."
