In a case of life imitating, er, message board life, someone just asked me what I like to read (not out of the blue; I had mentioned I spent several hours of my day off reading). After our discussion here, I was suddenly at a loss of how to answer, so I simply named / described the three books I’m currently reading :smack:
As I mentioned before, I’ve never had a problem interpreting the meaning of someone who says they prefer nonfiction. It gives me a quick snapshot of a certain aspect of their personality, and though I don’t necessarily *relate *to it - aside from reports for work and books for school I read almost exclusively fiction - I can’t say that I’ve ever gleaned any deeper meaning from it.
That was pretty much the gist of the conversation we had that led to my statement. I think one of them asked me something about one of Tolkien’s books, after which I said I pretty much only read non-fiction.
If everyone gets the exact same trophy, then maybe you have a point. But when I was a kid, there were different gradations- everyone got a trophy, but only the good kids got MVP, or fastest time, or whatever.
It’s kind of like the “no scorekeeping” leagues you hear about; all that means is that the parents don’t keep score; the kids definitely do, and know which team “won”.
Just getting the participation token doesn’t really pad anyone’s ego unduly; it’s just nice for the sad-sack kids to get a little something, rather than having everything and everyone constantly shit on them, because they’re not the best at anything. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they didn’t try, or that they didn’t care… if anything, in my experience, it was a way of reaffirming that they were part of the team, and that they contributed, in however small a way.
I saw it first-hand on the neighborhood swim teams; in my age cohort, there were 5 of us who were “good” (only one of us was actually objectively “good”- he went on to swim for Texas A&M), and there were about another 4-5 kids who weren’t good. The usual method was a couple of qualifying heats, and then the finals toward the end of the meet. Some of these not-good kids NEVER qualified for the finals all summer, and 2 of the 5 of the rest of us qualified EVERY race they were in, and the other 3 of us fought it out for the remaining slots.
At the end of the season, the fastest time awards, most valuable swimmers, etc… were awarded, and also, everyone got a dinky little trophy for participating. We all knew who was good, and who wasn’t, but those less capable swimmers treasured their trophies nonetheless; it was more of a recognition for their effort and contributions, however small.
Anyway, I bet there’s more to it than the OP tells us; if I had to guess, it would be more like the conversation was about novels, and then the OP spouts out that he likes non-fiction in some way that either made him look weird, cast a disparaging light on fiction, or possibly the kid associated non-fiction with things like encyclopedias or reference guides (variant of the OP making himself look weird).