Shining Thru

I ran across a website that had a list of the most commonly used literary references, that most people don’t even know where they originated…this one caught my attention, I thought it was rather interesting the way that we have developed phrases and words into our every day lives so that it is expected that everyone knows the terms as part of the American culture.

Yahoo. We know it either as a way to describe an idiot or as the Betamax of search engines. But… yahoo is really a term that was coined by Jonathan Swift in “Gulliver’s Travels”.

In the book, Gulliver ends up in a country ruled by horses… where they boss around deformed, brutish, primitive humans, called Yahoos.

That’s how the term yahoo entered the cultural lexicon as a way to describe low-brow humans. And, apparently, the guys who founded Yahoo.com picked that name because they felt the word yahoo described the unsophisticated, undeveloped Internet at that time. (http://www.11points.com/Books/11_Literary_References_People_Make_Without_Realizing_It)

This is just one of their many examples on the website, and I think it’s a really good one.  This is an example that we have come to just accept certain terms, I don’t know a single person that has ever wondered where the term yahoo came from, I think most people, myself included just took it as the expression of excitement that someone decided to name their search engine, it never even crossed my mind that it could have come from some other place and had a real meaning behind it, as suggested on the website.

Like literature I have seen many people, especially in the younger generations reference and quote movies, and than not even know that’s what they were doing, they may have never even seen the movie, just heard someone else quote it once before.  It’s interesting how terms and phrases get adopted into our culture and then are never let go, just passed on and passed on, generally taking on a slightly different meaning all together until it no longer has the same meaning that it was originally intended.

It’s interesting how things can take over the world, slowly and without notice….things catch on and spread through a culture until they reach the outskirts of another.  How one thing said in a movie, or in one classroom can lead to it being said generations later in another country…and the people probably don’t even know where it originated.  They simply know what word or phrase or symbol has come to mean to them over the years.  Things can infest the human population, leaking out like a disease, without anyone taking notice. 

I think it’s interesting to watch things evolve from one thing to the next.  To watch something take on a whole new persona with each new passing group that experiences it.  One word can transform and then you ask someone about it and their response is always interesting.  Some people will tell you that they remember when the phrase was made popular and that it didn’t mean the same thing then that it does now.  And others will tell you that they don’t know where the phrase come from…and yet it keeps getting repeated and taken from generation to generation without much explanation, if any. 

These unexplained phenomenons in culture slowly but surely spread their way across the country and then across the world.

Reading the local news was pretty interesting today.  I read that near by the city counsel voted to impose a daytime curfew for children of school age.  Their new law states that children between the ages of 6 and 16 should not be found in the community between the times of 8:30 am and 2:30 pm.  Police will take care of running into children of school age during the day by offering to take them home or to school, if they refuse than their guardian will get the citation…..Reading the comments was even more interesting.  Some people were complaining that this is forcing the police officers to take care of the parental responsibilities of these young people…however, I feel that it is forcing parents to be held accountable for the actions of their child or children.  Now a days, parents don’t have too many excuses for not knowing where their children are; schools have auto dialers that inform them whenever a child is late or absent, teachers send letters home, and most teenagers I see have cell phones that parents could track them with if they so choose.  Some people may argue that tracking their child is an invasion of their privacy, but I feel that it is your responsibility to know about your child while they are living under your roof and your responsibility.  I think it’s wonderful that law enforcement will help parents out when they see the young people walking around town for no good reason other than to avoid getting an education….However, I do think that it is pretty sad that we, as a society, would have to resort to such matters.  It is interesting the variety of comments on this particular article, one person said that it is a shame that parents will end up paying for their children’s mistakes and that “parent’s are use to footing the bill for their children…I think that is a major problem in our society….why shouldn’t parents be held responsible for their children, they are the ones that raised them.  I know there are some people who feel that they are in a hopeless situation with their children…but I think they are running out of people to blame other than the parents and the way that the children were raised.  If you let a 2 year old run the household, what do you think will happen when that toddler grows into a teenager?

The knowledge of people that make up society is always interesting to me…depending on who you are talking to you can learn a plethora of things.  It can sometimes be a big surprise what some people know…sometimes I even surprise myself at the connections I can make with what someone is saying.  It’s almost like playing a game of units of separation…how does my knowledge compare to their knowledge?  How can I make what they are saying make sense in my own head, or even if it is understood, what connection can I make so that I can remember this information and store it for further conversations?

Sometimes it’s surprising how one topic can begin a conversation that ends in a completely different place.  Sometimes I try to retrace the conversation to see how we ended on a certain topic, but most of the time I can’t remember all of the steps that we took…occasionally I can puzzle it out.

Using the knowledge of others is a good thing…I think that it is good to learn from what other people already know.  I personally learn well from having conversations about things and will learn more that way than any amount of reading about something.  I wonder what it would be like if we could access the information of all others around us…

Is there such a thing as a common knowledge base…I remember something vaguely from psychology class in college.  I do wonder how certain knowledge spreads like wildfire across our society and sometimes from one culture into another while other information is buried deep within a culture or stays in the books….What does it take to make knowledge spread?

“If you know I have a history, then you will respect me.”  I thought this was a very interesting quote when I came across it today in a book called, Black Indians:  A Hidden Heritage.  I think that this speaks volumes on why sometimes race becomes such an issue, I think that although some people are still just hateful, I think that a lot of it has to do with ignorance and the lack of knowledge of another’s culture, with that the lack of interest or want to understand.  Unfortunately, I think that a lot of people are raised to think that their culture is what’s “normal” and that there really isn’t a need to understand anyone else’s culture.  I think this is one of the saddest things about our American culture.  I think that it is sad how we only seem to teach about the white people in history, any minorities in the book might get a paragraph or two, but yet they can find a whole section or chapter devoted to a white person who did similar things, or things that effected our history and our culture just as much.  I think that it is important that we are exposed to different ways of life…what happens when something does happen on a global scale and we need to be able to accept another country’s way of life when we can’t even accept a lot of the culture differences that we have right here in America…what is even worse in my opinion is that a lot of people don’t even want to recognize that there are culture differences here in America, but there are…what kind of justice and respect are we giving to those differences if we wont even recognize that they exist….being exposed to culture differences and accepting them hardly makes you a racist, I think it makes you much more respectful of other cultures. 

I wonder how things would have been different as far as civilian support for some of the wars we have been through if we would have known about other countries’ cultures???  Makes me wonder why we think that the “American way” is the right way, or the only way….why can’t other cultures do as they see fit and have our respect?  I understand that there are some things that we have been brought up to believe in as wrong, but some of the people that we think are being oppressed, like their culture and their way of life and will tell you in a heart beat that they don’t want it any other way. 

A great example of this is cultures that make their women be completely covered other than their eyes..in America women have been taught that they need to fight for equal rights and not let any man hold them back and blah blah blah….not that our freedoms aren’t great, but I have heard testimony from some of these women who say that they like that they have to dress that way because it forces a man to respect them for who they are instead of just what they look like…I thought it was a really interesting take on it and not one that I would have come up with on my own.  I think it is really important that we take the time to consider someone else’s point of view.

Why don’t we take the time to learn and teach our younger generations respect for other cultures even if they are different?  What would be so wrong about having your child appreciate and respect someone for their differences instead of condemning them?

I’m amazed at how different people can be, even while living in the same “American culture”.  I grew up in Michigan, but am now living down south.  I had to get use to many things when I first came down here and I seem to get introduced to new experiences and rules all of the time.  I have really enjoyed the Southern ways so far, people seem more friendly and open and have a lot more manners and respect for people than where I am from.  It took a long time to accept that the guys around me were going to do all they could to get to the door to open it before I could.  I remember being confused the first time a guy came to pick me up and came to my side of the car to open the door.  Things like that just didn’t happen where I’m from. 

The social network down here also seems to be set up differently and most families stay close all of their lives, not just emotionally, but physically close to set you up for a nice support network.  It’s been really interesting to be able to observe all of these things with the people that I have met down here.

Even down here there are a multitude of different cultural experiences depending on where you are or what group you are hanging out with.  I find it so interesting that people can live in the same city and live so differently.  Not that anything is wrong with these differences, nobody’s culture is better than another’s; they’re just different.  I find that I like the differences of the south vs. the north that I have been exposed to.