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Phenomenenma of Collective Simultaneous Thought
This is wierd, I just discovered this guy Al Macintyre who started using Radio about a week before I did (from what I can tell) (Al if this is incorrect please do not let my ignorance offend you). It seems like he is reading my mind.
Today I was thinking of a Radio feature request, but as I thought it evolved into a more general beyond-Radio concept. I wish there were specialists (or I would like to find out if there are specialists) that had the expertise, cleverness, authority to coin phrases. I am not an articulate person, but I love to observe and (even better) discuss observations with people whom (self look up whom/who grammar here) I have great rapport (share a great rapport?) (Note to self - insert that cool dictionary.com lookup macro under the word rapport). My observations, however, exist in a form that lies between thought aemeba (sp?) (ameba - another dictionary.com macro candidate) and english (self should I capitalize english?).
This term-coining committee or phrase-coining service provider would listen to my long winded description of what I would like coined and then they would provide a new word or phrase that is easier to say (write) and more accurately describes the concept that I long-windedly (I am 99% sure windedly is not a word) explained. Then the question of patents popped into my head. I was thinking this coining would work like patents where one submits an idea and registers it with some registrar. Only the difference with patents is that I do not care if I am credited with coining the phrase or even the idea behind the phrase, I just want an easier way to express that idea.
Then I got to thinking (note to self - this is a long post should it instead be a story?), do the people that come up with the words get the credit for "coining a phrase" or is it the people who come with the concept, that acknowledge the concept exists and by acknowledging it take it slightly beyond tacit (look up tacit make sure you're using it correctly) knowledge.
THEN I started to wonder where/when the term "coin" began. (note to self - trying to say the term coin existed to mean monetary unit before then this other meaning was born or emerged or evolved.) I remembered some newspaper column maybe by Jon Carroll (not mondegreens but something similair) or perhaps it was an hour of Ronn Owens or maybe I even heard this in college (hey maybe I did learn something in San Luis) that there is a phrase or term or field of study that describes a process of tracing the origins of phrases to their first use (note to self clean up that sentence later).
So what I'm getting at is I somehow stumbled onto Al Macintyre's weblog today. He was posting his Radio progress (what he learns to do as he learns to do it, organized journal-style) into a category just like I am and he seems to have started using Radio the same time I did and there were so many similarities that I subscribed to his newsfeed. Even his newsfeed looks like what I imagine mine looks like because I read his today and I suspect that everything he posts gets published to his newsfeed, not just the posts that he thinks are news-worthy. Maybe I'm wrong, Al I am enjoying your feed by the way.
For the record, I imagine mine looks much worse, where every "testing.." post and edit of existing posts gets published which I fear would overstuff the newsfeed page of any subscriber. For example I edit a post because I notice the word there when it should have been their and I race to change it before someone actually visits this weblog then writes me off forever because of my hillbilly grammar. If my assumptions are correct then the subscribers of my newsfeed will have their "news" page dominated by this alison person who has been using Radio for about three weeks she is no Dave Winer no MacNeil Lehrer so why is she taking up more news real estate than they are? I assume (and sort of hope, for a while at least) that my subscriber count is at goose egg status.
So today in Al Macintyre's newsfeed he says this:
"Newbies see something we want to do, but we not know what it called, so we dither all over the place trying to describe it, and of course search engines not much help..."
which is so wierd because today I started my glossary page (which I created as a txt file in my www folder so I have no idea if it has or ever will be upstreamed) to record Userland jargon with definitions and origins AND I came up with the phrase patenting idea/concept/question/story topic. Isn't that eerie?
Somewhere in the last paragraph I remembered that there is some phrase or concept or field of study about collective thought and the (how do I say this.. not 'tendency') occurance (occurance or should I use phenomena) (insert dictionary macro under phenomena) of separate people coming up with the same idea at the same time. Some believe that accusations of patent violations are sometimes misplaced because of this collective-thought-simultaeous-idea-emergence thing.
Hey I just noticed that the phrase coining topic was sort of an analogy to patents, then I saw Al Mcyntire's post about trying to describe concepts he did not have a term for, then that made me think of collective simultaneous thought which brought be back to patents. Wow. I need a glass of water.
© Copyright 2002 Alison Fish.
Last update: 9/23/2002; 9:23:05 PM.
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