I was watching the show Outsourced the other day, and one of the plots was that some of the characters got addicted to paan. I haven’t heard about it before, so I started looking it up on the Internet. Along the way, I learned that it is made from betel leaves, which is also called sirih in Indonesian. That interested me, because my family was connected to Indonesia. Looking up that word brought me this little gem: Sirih leaves to restore virginity, not just the hymen.
Oooookay. I didn’t see that one coming.
Have you run into any “surprises” while looking up information on the Internet?
Well I don’t know if I have anything like the OP, but I’ve done searches for seemingly innocuous terms and Rule 34 rears it’s perverted head. Things like snowball, felching (which I thought meant stealing, SO NOT!) windmill, cottaging, (I mean c’mon! It sounds like a small house builder!) and Cleveland steamer. DO NOT LOOK UP ANY OF THOSE AT WORK. You have been warned.
I mentioned this a few months ago. I was looking something up about Autotune and found out it was invented by Exxon (the oil people) for interpreting seismic data.
So I’m a musical theatre person and my favorite musicals are… a little obscure. Not like super-indie way-off-Broadway obscure, but it’s hard to find the lyrics and stuff. They’re not printed with the CDs and they’re difficult to understand at certain points, so I’ve looked them up quite a few times. A few of the songs are out there, but not usually the ones I want.
So I was searching for lyrics again. It was for a thread here, though I can’t remember what it was about. I do remember I wanted to explain the meanings of my favorite song, but wasn’t entirely sure I had it completely right. Like I had the gist, but not the specific symbolism, so I wanted to look at the lyrics to see if I could figure it out and explain it better before posting “this is my favorite song. I only kind of know what it means.”
Anyway, what popped up was a dissertation from some guy looking to get his PhD in theatre. It was really interesting. It was long and there was a lot that I skipped, but there was a whole section on William Finn that went in depth about things like what makes his music interesting in terms of time signatures and leitmotivs and stuff. It goes into the symbolism, the themes, all kinds of things. It also has descriptions of scenes that I had no idea about. I only know the music and evidently, there was a lot of story in the blocking and so forth.