I was at a dinner party with some friends, enjoying some lovely post turkey fare and good conversation. The people around the table were diverse, an old British Film Maker, an historical preservationist, librarian and a couple staunch environmentalists. We were carrying on like normal, good conversation, heated at times but fun nontheless. The preservationist was telling a story and my bullshit meter was sparking off. So mid sentence I asked her for a cite. Well to you dopers reading this thread you’d think nothing of it asking for a cite…for a group sitting around a dinner table who has no idea what the straightdope is they looked perplexed. She looked at me with googly eyes and I laughed at my own awkwardness.
Anyway, she had a vague idea of what I meant and it worked out that she explained herself a little more than she had…my wife laughed because she new what I was talking about but said that I should have tempered myself at a dinner party.
Anyway thought I’d share this bit of funnyness! Has anyone else ever rbought the dope to places it isn’t normally found?
Here in Houston there is a ‘new’ morning team on one of the am radio stations- Walton and Johnson (and boy do they stink). They are now doing a ton of radio commercials, also. One of the commercials is for a dog training company, and Johnson (I think) says “Training ensued!” during the commercial.
Well, I said “IMHO” a few nights ago at a dinner party. People just looked at me until I broke that out a bit. The other thing is that I tend to use the little acronyms that are common here like IMHO, AFAICT, etc. when I’m writing emails to people. They usually send me some kind of
I’m pretty good at refraining from exclaiming “cite!” but I am more likely now to corner people and ask them if they got their information from anywhere other than “I heard.”
People get really pissy about that too, especially when you question Urban Legends.
I think that’s what’s rubbed off on me too. I don’t actually use any SDMB terminology or slang IRL, but I’ve just generally become a much more hard-nosed sumbitch when it comes to other people’s bullshit. I’ve successfully trained/scared off the denizens of at least one other, non-related message board from posting “lists of interesting facts”, because they know I’ll go through them one by one, destroying most mercilessly. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been like that if I’d never found this place.
Yeah, I hate to say it, but being a total buzz-kill is kind of satisfying in its own way. Fightin’ ignorance, and all that. My friends still like me, but they send me less forwarded emails, let’s just say.
Well, I used to, when people still sent me Urban Legends.
I’ve asked for cites and introduced the phrase “for a given value of” into family usage.
As in “Yeah I agree with your point, for a given value of ‘agree’”.
The latter may not have started on the Dope, but it’s where I learned it.
I would like to see some research on this phenomenon. I’m sure it boils down to nothing more than people developing strong convictions for something they want to believe, but I don’t understand why people so passionately desire to believe that which is absurd, and defend it to equally absurd lengths.
I sometimes find myself dropping little counter points to points that were never made. For example, I like saying, “When I get married, I want people to throw rice. Just to help bring back that old tradition.” It invariably turns into a lecture on my hatred for birds.
I was listening to a call in radio show late one evening last week (people call in for lovelife advice, I think it is), and somebody sent an email to the show asking about a situation he was in. To paraphrase from my best recollection, he said that he came home after drinking, he met his neighbour in the hallway, and she said she wanted him to come watch her masturbate because it was the only way she could get off, and he did. He mentioned it to his girlfriend the next day, and she thought he had cheated by watching another woman masturbate, but he didn’t think he had done anything wrong.
This was a very :eek: moment for me - we did a thread about that exact situation a year or so ago. Either we were getting trolled by the person who started that thread then, or the person emailing the show now is a Doper, or our “private” conversations here can pass into general internet lore. Or something else. It was a surreal moment, anyway.
