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You've been accumulating cruft year after year, a gnawing sense in the back of your mind that someday you'll have to do something with this stuff. Actually getting down to looking through it all, one by one, and throwing out everything you're never going to use: the decrapification of your apartment.
I know him, I took his Apple Unix when he was in New York.
Oh, yeah, that was when I moved out of the Brooklyn apartment. That was round one of the great decrapification.
Decrapification was the project for 2007, and oh my god the stuff we got rid of!
48π 2π
A factoid that is false or unsupported by evidence, but gets into public circulation anyway. Once it is repeated and quoted enough times, it gains a life of its own, and people assume it is true because they get it from multiple sources, even though the original source is flawed or unverified, or the information turns out to be false.
One common fictoid is the idea that people need to drink 8 glasses of water a day to be healthy. There's no sound basis for this recommendation, but it is quoted and given as advice frequently.
Recently (as of new years 2009), one of the big news stories has been the collapse of a fraudulent investment fund run by Bernard Madoff, which turned out to be a ponzi scheme. Although it takes months to go through the records to figure out how much money was involved, an initial estimate was that "up to $50 billion dollars may have been lost". Despite the fact that this was an initial best guess rather than the result of actual auditing, and despite the fact that even a clear definition of "money lost" in this case is vague, this $50 billion estimate has become a fictoid, and is being repeated in the press. Plenty of people believe that it is well accepted that $50 billion is the amount of money that was lost in this fraudulent scheme.
15π 2π
To be ignored by someone without purpose or malice. You simply don't register on their radar screen. ::bleep, bleep, bleep::
I played arm-candy sufficiently well to get totally bleeped by a state rep. He said hi, and then utterly ignored me for the rest of the conversation. it was sort of entertainingly disconcerting.
10π 7π
A misplaced pop culture reference, usually caused by confusing similar names or words, and referring to someone/something irrelevant or ridiculous in context.
As with a malapropism, the confusion and result are similar; however, rather than confusing the meaning of standard English words, one is confusing similar-sounding names & pop culture references.
A malapopism can also occur when someone is unaware of the fact that the same name refers to a different person/thing/event, and makes an inappropriate reference based on that mistaken assumption.
Both kinds of malapopisms (similar names; same name but different people) in conversation:
Jen: The Cottingley fairies were a hoax, and Arthur Conan Doyle was fooled. James Randi's book tells all about it.
Arshad: Damn fairies, always wanting to restrict the free market! :)
Everyone: *stares blankly*
Arshad: You know... all that Libertarian stuff Randi wrote?
Everyone: Oh, you mean Ayn Rand!
Arshad: ohhh.
Who were the Senators from Illinois before Obama and Durbin?
Well, before Durbin was Paul Simon...
Hah, did he sing "Sound of Silence" to the Senate?
Dude, that's not the same Paul Simon!
13π 1π
A misplaced pop culture reference, usually caused by confusing similar names or words, and referring to someone/something irrelevant or ridiculous in context.
As with a malapropism, the confusion and result are similar; however, rather than confusing the meaning of standard English words, one is confusing similar-sounding names & pop culture references.
A malapopism can also occur when someone is unaware of the fact that the same name refers to a different person/thing/event, and makes an inappropriate reference based on that mistaken assumption.
Both kinds of malapopisms (similar names; same name but different people) in conversation:
Jen: The Cottingley fairies were a hoax, and Arthur Conan Doyle was fooled. James Randi's book tells all about it.
Arshad: Damn fairies, always wanting to restrict the free market! :)
Everyone: *stares blankly*
Arshad: You know... all that Libertarian stuff Randi wrote?
Everyone: Oh, you mean Ayn Rand!
Arshad: ohhh.
Who were the Senators from Illinois before Obama and Durbin?
Well, before Durbin was Paul Simon...
Hah, did he sing "Sound of Silence" to the Senate?
Dude, that's not the same Paul Simon!
1π 1π
To install Microsoft Windows on someone's computer.
They won't like it, but the IT department says we need to fenestrate the entire department, including the ones who are using Linux.
34π 17π
"Somebody Else's Problem", an effectively-magical field that obscures things you think aren't relevant to you, such that even though you see them (or hear them or read them) you don't actually *notice*, and quickly forget.
More generally, the phenomenon that causes people to ignore issues that they know about but think of as either not something they can do anything about, or not personally relevant to them right now. This can result in something that's very important to a group of people being ignored by every individual member of that group.
Popularized by Douglas Adams in the "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" series, in which Ford Prefect describes it as:
"An SEP is something we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem.... The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won't see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye."
In that series, a strange object can be effectively hidden from view while out in plain sight, by an "SEP field", which "relies on people's natural predisposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain."
It's just been sitting there all day, hundreds of people have walked by, and nobody said anything or even turned to look! It's like it's got an SEP field around it.
212π 38π