Transfer Phenomena
- Thread starter sus
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woops
is not like other people
worked for me!
IdleRich
IdleRich
One thing I will say, being trapped (specifically growing up I guess) in nowheresville is bad, but if you one day get to move to somewheresville then it's not the end of the world. You can look on it as almost, well I want to say a rite of passage, but traditionally a rite of passage in my mind involves actively doing something, not just sitting around in incredible boredom for years on end. But there is a sense of having somehow earned the right to enjoy the excitements of somewhereville when you get to move there, perhaps you appreciate it more than those who grew up there... though I do genuinely believe that growing up in a place where nothing at all happens and life is slow and you are not part of culture, there is no stimulation or action or.... well, you know what I mean, but I do think that this puts you way behind those who grew up in fast actiony places in terms of street smarts, savvy, cool I dunno, lots of things. I mean it puts you waaaaaaay way behind, not just that for a couple of weeks you're catching up and then you're laughing at the newbies who arrive in the big bad city a month after you, I mean that you may never catch up, the damage in that respect has already been done... perhaps there is something you gained in exchange as is the normal way of things, but I have to admit that off the top of my head I am struggling to think what it could be.
And also of course there are those who never escape, who live nowhere forever. Some choose this I suppose or at least claim too but I think that many just can't escape cos they don't have the money or the education or the kind of mind that understands that if you're willing you may just be able to make that leap.
woops
is not like other people
yes, this is exactly what i meant, by england is shit. of course london is great. but england is shit.
sus
Moderator
Puhlease, that's what this forum already does, I'm just contributing to the linguistic machine.
Part of language games is coming up with new terms to describe parts of your experience that currently aren't covered by existing terms
luka
Well-known member
i just asked if you make them up or borrow them! i wasnt being mean!
entertainment
Well-known member
how is can something be pseudo-science when you don't believe in science!? checkmate
entertainment
Well-known member
i've seen constant escape do a lot of these but sadly i never understand them
IdleRich
IdleRich
Probably true, but for someone coming from my background the difference between them is still like moving from a world of black and white to colour. In Uffington there was one bus, it was on a Tuesday. When you live in a city and you go to the stop and you have just missed a bus or a train or something you go "Oh for fuck's sake, can't believe it, the next one is in nine minutes, what the hell? What the fuck am I gonna do for nine fucking minutes, this is ridiculous, how could this happen?".
Whereas in Uffington if you miss the bus you're just like "Oh dear, I now live in Uffington." Accepting that is really the only thing you can do, if you fight against it you will just go mad,. You might think "Fuck it, Swindon is only twelve miles away, I'll walk" but if you ever do that this weird big white balloon cuts you off and sends you back. It's a totally different world, a totally different way of thinking, a complete switch of mindset.
When I did finally realise my dream and move to London my friend and I had literally no money, we shared a grimy bedsit type thing in Maida Vale that was horrible but our first night we decided to go out to a random club (The Wag maybe I think it was) to celebrate and after I was there like ten minutes this super hot American girl grabbed me and lured me to back her den of iniquity... I was thinking "Wow, in my fantasies of big city life I pretended to myself it would be like this but obviously it wasn't gonna be.... except it fucking is! The streets ARE paved with gold!" - admittedly that never happened again over the twenty years or so I lived there, which makes me think that it was some kind of London God welcoming me to my new life. It's really the only explanation that makes sense.
luka
Well-known member
ive talked to edmund a lot so i understand what a big deal it is to escape. in some ways youre right in that we never really get that sense of cutting the apron strings and risking it all to get to the big city. we dont do the initiation ritual to become adults of the tribe but as you say we never have to undergo the boredom and alienation of small town life either. not to mention the constant threat of lethal violence for looking like a weirdo
IdleRich
IdleRich
You think that one day - if you're lucky - you get the tap on the shoulder? Someone somewhere has recognised your talent for communicating in this particular kind of new age meets business meets science uber lingo and your reward is to be given the key to the jargon warehouse. You have proved you ability without it, now we can watch you really get the wind in your sails and absolutely take off.
Of course there are many different such secret societies that one can be inducted into or invited to join after your potential has been noted by the right people. Compared to the ones that run the world or control high society dogging, the Jargon Silo Society is possibly not the most exciting or seductive but it's not to be sneered at either - and also, I don't think (as far as I know) that there is anything to prevent you from being a member of two or more such societies - on Mondays you can plot the fate of the Kurds with a cadre of sinister hooded figures (If the hoods came off you would instantly recognise Craner and Vimothy amongst them) while on Thursday you debate which complex new coinages you are going to roll ou this week. The idea is that you all use the same ones so that you will confuse those that you are debating wit - and if people start googing the phrases to try and understand the usage, they will see all the new ones so you will be reinforcing each other. It's very clever actually.
IdleRich
IdleRich
Oh yeah, I remember all that. There was one pub in our village (in fact there were two for ages but it really couldn't sustain two, the second most popular one was always teetering on the edge of collapse, a new landlord would come in and do a massive promotional week where beers cost 1p a pint or something meaning that the pub was full for a week, then that finished and everyone went back to the other one, leaving the White Horse totally dead for a few months until you got another new owner, rinse and repeat) and I got all kinds of grief in there.
I remember going out for a leak and someone had fixed a note to my stool which contained a graphic homophobic slur, the viciousness was actually not undermined by the spelling "Shit staber" although I did laugh at it later.
But the point is that when there were incidents like that or even punches thrown etc the owner's response was based on the most simple and brutal economic reality. I remember saying "That guy just fucking hit me for no reason at all and you're throwing me out?" and the landlord said "I know but the bottom line is that you're gonna be going back to university in a week or so and drinking and spending money there, but this guy is gonna come in here and piss his wages up the wall every single day for the next twenty years so I gotta keep him onside. Sorry". I suppose he was being honest at least.
I've read things about village communities how people used to listen to the wise elder farmers and suchlike and now sadly people form their own networks online and the power of these local communities with their kindly leaders full of homespun wisdom has been diminished... well I don't miss them at all. When I went to university and then to London and started hanging out with the people that I chose to hang out with and was able to build my own communities via clubs and things like dissensus - guess what, I was a lot fucking happier.
However much you dress things up as "traditional" or "local communities rejecting the kind of shallow, new-fangled nonsense of the big cities" the real truth is that the village where I grew up WAS full of racists and homophobes - particularly ridiculous when you realise that ninety percent of the people who lived there had never met a black person (maybe a couple of Asians from the nearby town which was big enough to have a takeaway curry place) or anyone who was openly out. I remember this guy I used to know called Rasheed who was friends with this girl I used to go out with. He was very camp, obviously gay and he went to stay with a friend's family near Aberystwyth.... one of their neighbours famously (in our circle I mean of course) began a conversation with him with the immortal line "I don't mind that you're black but...."
sus
Moderator
Oh I usually make them up but they're not "from scratch," like "transfer phenomena" is just "game transfer phenomena" with the game part dropped. "Opticratic" is a riff on "meritocratic" that emphasizes optics and images, being selected based on appearance. Or "selection games" is a hybrid of natural selection and Goffman's "expression games." Some are straight-up borrowed from deep dives into the literature—"strategic interaction." Others are popular in various Internet subcultures—"cargoculting," "type of guy theory," "anti-inductive."