--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Andrew Jarrette <anjarrette@...>
wrote:
>
> I have a burning question: Where do you, Brian Scott, and
>Torsten, and Peter P, and the others, find your quotes so easily?
>You all seem to be able to quote obscure old Danish or Icelandic
>passages from early works with the utmost of ease. Do you have it
>all memorized? Do you have the books very close at hand, with the
>passages alphabetized in an index? How do you do it? It seems
>impossible to me! Could someone offer an explanation, if this is
>not asking too much?
As you may know, Richard Dawkins proposed a theory by which we
people are a substrate for memes, bits of knowledge that selfishly
try to multiply and infect other substrates, ie people. I'd like to
propose an extension to that theory: Memes are slowed down at
language boundaries. That means eg. that my head, since I speak
Danish, is filled with bits of information that's trivial to a
Danish-speaker, but unknown and obscure to speakers of other
languages. Since that is so, sometimes there are unexpected results,
cf the cartoon crisis.
The tune to the first two lines of the song was written down in the
margin of a manuscript, I forgot which. It was used for many years
as a pause signal on the Danish state radio.
Torsten