Sunday, April 5, 2009

good night!

Yeah, apparently I can't shut up. Deal.

1.) I noticed that in my last post I said "in the bottom" of my playlist, when I guess what I actually mean is "later in" or "at the end of." Does anyone else have a weird mental spatial association like that? I know I do it often with tech things/the internet. Like, back in the mid-late 90s when I was first online, there were a couple of AOL message boards I hung out on, and because one of them was below the other in the menu, I always literally felt like I was going downstairs when I left one to go to the second. Stop looking at me like that. I'm sure it's perfectly normal. My playlists are like that. The end of one is the bottom to me, not the end, because in my brain it's organized by how it looks on the menu display.

2.) I was reading this woman this evening talking about how her son asked her to pick up deodorant for him when she went to the store, but it had to be a very specific brand and variety, and I cracked up, because she was saying that she was standing in the aisle looking at the 59 different men's antiperspirants and thinking, "Why do they need so many different flavors of deodorant, for god's sake?" I honestly think "flavor" is going to take on a new meaning, because I've been hearing people misuse it all the time as synonym for variety when speaking about things *you don't eat*. In fact, I couldn't swear that I haven't done so myself a time or two. Especially for things like Body Shop shower gel which comes in like mango and papaya and satsuma and coconut etc etc and smells like you could possibly eat it. But, sadly, mango or no, shower gel technically does not come in flavors. Anyway, have you noticed this too?

xoxo

4 comments:

Craig H said...

Tech slang has misused "flavor" for years (e.g. "which flavor of operating system do you run?") and I must admit having gone a good way down that path with little hope of coming completely back.

The one usage that fascinates me even more than that, though, is "flavor of beer". (Something I've been known to say from time to time). I'm aware, when I say it, that there are no exact words to describe beer's flavor, other than simple comparative ones like "sweeter", or more complicated analagous ones like "nutty" or "fruity", but, basically, most people get by with "beer" as its own eponymous flavor, and that's all they need or care about. There are *types* of beer, of course, like ales and lagers and stouts and such, but that's as far as our official distinctions go. Everything else is personal and usually kept to ourselves.

This is opposed to things like ice cream and Gatorade, which have no end to the number of official flavor choices in the supermarket aisle. Observing, much like these other concoctions, there is no dearth of choices for beer in the beer aisle, it occurs to me that there's a whole world of flavor that we humans have yet to name. (Wine-O's might agree, too, though you couldn't prove that by me).

At least, with beer, we're still talking about taste...

But, yeah, Old Spice is my favorite flavor of deodorant.

Uncle said...

It's a long way, though, from flavours of heavily-marketed shampoo or whatnot (you would need to be *very* hungry)to Dr. Bronner's soap, which in theory one could eat. Disclaimer#1: I never actually put that to the test.

It also makes one wonder whether some unfortunate little lab bunny has had to taste the papaya shower gel to make sure that it really is papaya. Disclaimer #2: Uncle is in one of his eviller moods tonight.

JLP said...

(1) I hear the word "top" used for the beginning of a playlist, so I found nothing unusual with it.

(2) Physicists indulge in a horrible mixing of metaphors: fundamental particles of the universe come in various "species" or "flavors", and the attributes of a flavor include "charm" and "strangeness". In other words, their naming scheme is tripping balls.

malevolent andrea said...

Physics is *awesome*. I like to read those pop physics books (which I'm sure actual physicists sneer at unless they're writing one), and I wish I were smart enough to understand more about it.