Ron -
Ah. Stories and language and names. Remember those threads from last
spring? They've been consuming quite a bit of my mental energy ever
since. They are three of the most important concepts in my own personal
conceptuary (a collection of birds is an 'aviary', a collection of beasts
is a 'bestiary', a collection of concepts is a...). And I'm glad to see
an example like this come up, real people doing real things spontaneously.
In fact, I'd like to ask you to expand a little on this. I've interleaved
a few notes to identify the points I'm most curious about.
On Sat, 23 Sep 1995 you wrote:
> Some friends of mine, Michael and Lisa, just participated in a Boston-New
> York bike ride, to benefit AIDS research, along with a couple of thousand
> other riders. Lisa told me that eventually the riders created a kind of
> "lingo" that began to tie them to one another as they, for example, came
> upon tricky turns and yelled out a brief message to warn, or congratulate,
> others.
>
> Needless to say, the experience was exhilarating; but I was struck -- and
> so were my friends -- by the communally-created language that continued to
> push them forward. (The weather during the last of the three days was
> hellish; they needed all the push they could get...)
What is it that "strikes" you? The vocabulary? The inventiveness? The
role the language played? Something else I haven't mentioned?
> I'm probably making this sound fancier than it was. Or maybe not.
That's probably in the eye of the beholder... this beholder says 'not'.
"Making it fancier than it was" is a risk that _always_ accompanies naming
something for the first time, as you are doing here describing the
experience of your friends.
But (at
> the risk of beating a tired, if not a dead, horse), I began to think about
> the specific language that is used to create stories
You began to think. What thoughts? Questions? Answers? What is it
about this language that is "specific"? What is unique about it or what
distinguishes it from what other kinds of language?
> that are in turn
> embellishing that language and thereby creating more stories.
Never mind my questions above -- they look like badgering. Just expand or
restate what you're saying here.
> Stories,
> indeed, about the past are one thing; stories __in process__ are another.
Ah yes! I think of a story-in-process as a "performance" (in my own
language, a performance is indeed a subclass of story). Thanks for a most
provocative post.
--
Regards
Jim Michmerhuizen jamzen@world.std.com
web residence at http://world.std.com/~jamzen/
-----------------------------------------------------^---------------------
. . . . . . . . . . Actions speak louder than words . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . but not as clearly . . . . . . . . . .