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A strange, middle-aged man talked to me for a while at Food Not Bombs today. It was really awkward, but listen to this I thought it was funny. He said since I was the next generation, he needed to ask me two questions.
1. What does "fnord" mean?
2. Why do 'you kids' wear your underwear so high and your pants so low!?
I told him I didn't really ( Read more... )
Main article: Fnord
One of the most well-known concepts in the book is the fnord, a word coined by the writers of Principia Discordia and given meaning by Shea and Wilson for Illuminatus! which has since been adopted in numerous other contexts. It makes its first appearance in The Illuminatus! Trilogy without any explanation: "The only good fnord is a dead fnord"[11]. Several other unexplained appearances follow. Only much later in the story is the secret revealed, when Joe Malik is hypnotized by Hagbard Celine to recall suppressed memories of his first-grade teacher training his class to ignore the fnords: "If you don't see the fnord it can't eat you, don't see the fnord, don't see the fnord..."[12]
In the Shea/Wilson fictional construct, it is a type of subliminal message technique brought about by seeing the word in print: a word that the majority of the population since early childhood has been trained to ignore (and, of course, trained to forget both the training and the fact that they are ignoring it), but which they associate with a vague sense of unease. Upon seeing the word, readers experience a panic reaction, they then subconsciously suppress all memories of having seen the word, but the sense of panic remains. They therefore associate the unease with the news story they are reading. Fnords are scattered liberally in the text of newspapers and magazines, causing fear and anxiety in those following current events. However, there are no fnords in the advertisements, thus encouraging a consumerist society. Fnord magazine equated the fnords with a generalized effort to control and brainwash the populace. To "see the fnords" would imply an attempt to wrestle back individual autonomy.
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