(peotry)

A moment of sadness the other day as I read out some wizard poetry jokes only to discover that Jon, having studied Science So We Can Get Everything Working Again and not Poems And Rubbish, had no hope of enjoying, benefiting from or understanding them. The other day (while insane, admittedly) I suddenly started banging on about Kubla Khan, quoting huge fragments of it to illustrate my no doubt brilliant point. Imagine being randomly hit with Coleridge's English out of nowhere. Think of Barbara running over that Dalek in the truck. That's who he's married to, folks. The problem here is not Jon's lack of Eng Lit, it's my blithe presumption that everyone shares the same cultural vocabulary, ie mine.

(ETA: After comparing notes, it turns out that Jon did as much high school Eng Lit as I did!)

... as I glance back over this posting I see it, too, is studded with unexplained allusions* meaningless to most of my small readership. It's a terrible habit I have always had. For example, I am torn between wearing the most obvious SHINee t-shirt possible to Chicago TARDIS, preferably one which says "SHINee" in huge letters, and one which bears the catchphrase "Is this the reality you wanted?" or, even more obscurely, the demo lyrics "soulectronic hiphipholic".

The kindest interpretation I can put on this is that I'm addicted to the "A-ha!" effect - the jolt of neural pleasure you get when you get a punchline, solve a crossword clue, decipher a phrase in another language, or recognise a fannish in-joke.

* The Molesworth books, The Meaning of Liff, the 70s War of the Worlds rock opera, and a quote from Kubla Khan itself. Sigh.

Etymology

Some Kpop fan or other was whinging about the use of the term "bias" to mean "the member of a band to whom I am most sexually attracted". Quoth they: "You're just admitting that you're being unfair because of your idols.".

Well, this is merely wrong; "bias" means "inclination" as well as "prejudice". However, I'm not even sure that "bias" is an English word in this context. It may be Korean loanword from English, or a Korean loanword from Japanese which was originally a loanword from English - something like the terms "skinship" and "fanservice", which look like English words, but aren't. English itself, the whore of whores when it comes to loanwords, does plenty of this sort of thing too, jamming together bits of other languages to create new English words like "workaholic"*.

(Other fans complain of idols being called "perfect" and "flawless", and/or "whores" and "sluts", not realising that these terms - rather like "bias", really - are frequently applied with heavy irony to express sexual frustration. Heaven knows what they make of postings where people swear at their biases, metaphorically throw things at their faces, wreck the furniture, etc.)

ETA: It occurred to me to wonder what a fan who protests the use of "bias" would make of other fandom-appropriated words like "canon" (a term which has lost since lost its original tongue-in-cheek fannish meaning!). Come to think of it, when and how did we arrive at the verb "to ship"?

* That's three languages in one - I bet there's some English word stitched together from bits of four or even more.