Chris

Idle Thumbs 152: Piercing the Fourth Dimension

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"Recommend" (as a noun)

"Gross"

"Best"

"Worst"

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Banning this list would make the podcast impossible.

Gross/worst.

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Man I love almost all of these. Word bans are good when you're trying to say something substantive but can only come up with 'compelling'. I don't think the cast usually suffers from a lack of descriptive flavor.

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I don't think you can apply rules or ideas about the use of language in a solo written medium to inform a collaborative spoken medium, especially one that relies on a quick rapport between collaborators and sense of community/? to be effective. Those words get overused because people who like and talk to each other a lot start to form an ingroup vocabulary, and while I can see it maybe being weird to a first time listener (or anyone who has internalized them and then notices later), it also can provide a deeper sense of meaning for what are otherwise fairly meaningless words. (I mean, "Gross" as a Jake adjective frequently means slightly different things than a Chris or Nick "gross", and part of that is delivery (another thing that makes the idea of the 'overuse' of words in a spoken medium a bit of a weird thing to me.), but part of that is a difference in personality, and what things evoke the word "Gross" from them.) 

I guess to me a collaborative podcast is an extremely different form than sitting down to write a thing, and I'd rather have a number of overused words than podcasters tripping over themselves trying to avoid human nature,

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A banned word list would only work in conjunction with a simpsons style communal zapper where one thumb could zap the other upon violation.

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I don't think you can apply rules or ideas about the use of language in a solo written medium to inform a collaborative spoken medium, especially one that relies on a quick rapport between collaborators and sense of community/? to be effective. Those words get overused because people who like and talk to each other a lot start to form an ingroup vocabulary, and while I can see it maybe being weird to a first time listener (or anyone who has internalized them and then notices later), it also can provide a deeper sense of meaning for what are otherwise fairly meaningless words. (I mean, "Gross" as a Jake adjective frequently means slightly different things than a Chris or Nick "gross", and part of that is delivery (another thing that makes the idea of the 'overuse' of words in a spoken medium a bit of a weird thing to me.), but part of that is a difference in personality, and what things evoke the word "Gross" from them.) 

I guess to me a collaborative podcast is an extremely different form than sitting down to write a thing, and I'd rather have a number of overused words than podcasters tripping over themselves trying to avoid human nature,

 

There's the idea that a really specific and established lexicon among a small social group can actually end up becoming a bunch of thought-terminating cliches, but I think we're really just teasing. Certainly, my biggest nightmare is a group of people pointing out all the ways I repeat myself, like the Shania Twain story Jude Law tells over and over in I Heart Huckabees.

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I don't think you can apply rules or ideas about the use of language in a solo written medium to inform a collaborative spoken medium, especially one that relies on a quick rapport between collaborators and sense of community/? to be effective. Those words get overused because people who like and talk to each other a lot start to form an ingroup vocabulary, and while I can see it maybe being weird to a first time listener (or anyone who has internalized them and then notices later), it also can provide a deeper sense of meaning for what are otherwise fairly meaningless words. (I mean, "Gross" as a Jake adjective frequently means slightly different things than a Chris or Nick "gross", and part of that is delivery (another thing that makes the idea of the 'overuse' of words in a spoken medium a bit of a weird thing to me.), but part of that is a difference in personality, and what things evoke the word "Gross" from them.) 

I guess to me a collaborative podcast is an extremely different form than sitting down to write a thing, and I'd rather have a number of overused words than podcasters tripping over themselves trying to avoid human nature,

 

Agreed. I'm pretty sure we were all just teasing. (Although Sean's habit of turning verbs into nouns does annoy me).

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I was definitely teasing. I've never heard anyone besides Sean use "solid two count," oddly enough.

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I'm not joking around; I am calling up the Thought Police right now!

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Sean, you should listen to this past week's This American Life episode. It really got me right in the old gazoo.

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Sean, you should listen to this past week's This American Life episode. It really got me right in the old gazoo.

 

Holy crap, what a great interview.  It's so rare to hear a politician and his wife, even a retired one, speak so frankly about such intimate topics.  It makes me hope my wife and I grow into being such cool old people who can help younger couples. 

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