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[readingthedark]

greygirlbeast brought up slang today and my comment ran long, so I figured I'd put it here:
An odd thing. I was complaining to Spooky about baffling online slang, and that led to a general discussion of slang as a phenomenon associated more with subcultures than with linguistic evolution, and to a discussion of slang that attended various times and scenes and

Comments

[witchchild]

and now I want to know how you came into contact with PLW.

[readingthedark]

I went to a freaky Buddhist grad school for a degree in writing/art. The four week Summer Writing Program was mostly an homage to the Beats and contemporary experimental traditions, with a wide range of counterculture (transgressive? outrider?) writers stopping by. PLW was one of the many fonts of wisdom who lectured, debated, or rambled bizarrely into the wee hours...

[witchchild]

now that's pretty cool.

[readingthedark]

I have the strange luxury of having met most of my favorite living writers. Sometimes, it's strangely jarring (such as thinking back to when I thought Hakim Bey and PLW were two separate people and how PLW was utterly unlike the Bey I imagined), and sometimes it turns out that I love someone's work but dislike them--but it's almost always interesting!

[muffyjo]

I will have to go searching for this but a coworker was talking about an article wherein people in Victorian England were smarter than we are today. I find it plausible, certainly for the merchant class and above, which is where they could measure it most effectively, but I do wonder how they were measuring this. But it does feel like we're not so much reaching down to pull our fellow man up as we are being pulled down by the common misconceptions

[readingthedark]

Based on the Internet vibe of my little ramble, I'd say that the meaning and nature of intelligence is shifting too. Now, being able to find information is often much more valuable than being able to retain information. Sure, people had commonplace books that they could carry around with them, but the Internet make information more omnipresent. And, yeah, I think being able to interact with strangers without leaving one's home has also had a significant impact on culture and social constructs. Along with not enjoying the marginalization of being an out-group, it's also a whole lot easier to find one's own in-groups