brigdh

Hee! Yep, I think I can guess where that came from.

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telophase.livejournal.com

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Oh. I can't imagine what word that came from, but it's lovely.

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amyannosu.livejournal.com

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Hee, I think I can guess where that picture came from. :)

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Can I interrupt with a bizarre question about cognitive styles here? Because I am both baffled and fascinated, and I want to know the answer.

This meme (which I've never seen before, thus my interrupting on your journal) implies that people, well, think of words when they think of other people they know. As does the fact that there are already three responses here, indicating that people in fact do so easily and naturally.

Is this really true? Do words come instantly to your mind -- to everybody else's mind -- when they think about others? Because I have never had that happen in all my life.

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You're not alone. I did use the first word that came to mind, but its appearance was by no means instant. In fact, I don't think I'm going to mention how long it took to come up with one. I'm glad you posted, though, because I also assumed most people must find it absurdly easy.

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Good. I feel less like an alien now.

I've always been baffled by that theory (is it Chomsky's?) that people can only think in language, as opposed to only being able to communicate complex ideas in language. It makes for an interesting intellectual construct, I suppose, but it's so obviously, utterely contradicted by internal experience that I have trouble imagining anyone's being able to take it seriously for a moment -- that is, unless their minds were utterly, unimaginably different from mine. And yours, and Brigdh's.

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. . . and once again I wish that LJ had a feature that permitted me to edit comments. You'd think I could see that I'd not only misspelled "utterly" but used it twice in a sentence and a half before I hit the post button. But you'd be wrong.

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"Edit comments" is the feature LJ needs most of all. I left a comment a little while ago, only to glance at it after I'd hit post and realize that I'd forgotten to type the entire second half of a sentence, rendering me entirely incompherensible. And that's not the only time I've done it.

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*laughs* I'm with you, actually- my attempts to reduce the people I know to a single word tend to involve a lot of staring at the screen blankly, before coming up with something terribly insipid like "artist". If there are people who naturally label people with single words, I'm not one of them.

But I've seen this meme, and others like it, that I'm no longer surprised by the idea. Apparantly this "word" thing must be rather common, because I've seen it in real life even moreso than online: a game that every ice-breaker type event I've ever been to is terribly fond of is "describe yourself in three words". If you thought describing someone else was hard, imagine doing it to yourself! How on earth anyone is supposed to be able to reduce their whole being and thoughts and habits and talents and history and personality to three words eludes me. Though everyone else I've ever been trapped in such events with seemed to handle it well enough.

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The kinds of people who'd come up with a game like that can probably do it, no problem. I bet they all describe themselves as, "cute and fun," so that in practice they don't have to even think of three words, just of one. If they were trying to really describe themselves, and not just slot themselves into recognized social categories, then they'd have an issue.

Now this is making me think of the time I got called for jury duty, and on voir dire the defendant's lawyer asked me what I thought when I heard the phrase, "Where there's smoke, there's fire." And I looked back at him, in my vague and baffled way, and said, "Mostly I think, 'Could you please not use stupid cliches as a substitute for actual thought?'" And the judge laughed, and the lawyer stared at me as though I'd grown a second head, and they let me go home soon afterward. It's like your party game: normal people, evidently, don't even hear the precise question that was asked, let alone make a serious attempt to answer it.

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That's... remarkably similiar to what most people I've had to play the game with tend to produce, actually.

*laughs* That's a wonderful way to get out of jury duty, though.

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Best way to get out of jury duty ever.

How I wish I had the gumption to say things like that, instead of just thinking them.

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You're too kind. Alas, it's not gumption, it's geekitude. If I could think of something socially acceptable to say in these situations in time to substitute it for things like this, I would. But no: inside my brain it's like the old programmer mantra: garbage in, garbage out.

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telophase.livejournal.com

As this meme has spread across my friendslist, I've been picking colors from their journal, using their profession or hobby, or thinking of words that seem to go with "I don't know much about you," like 'vague' or 'obscure.' :D

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Ha! I never would have thought to search for 'vague' or 'obscure', but that's a great idea. *grins* And I'm sure it turns up some interesting pictures.

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Another lovely one! This makes me terribly curious to know the words that they came from.

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