Um, I’m glad you and I’ve never walked anywhere together, then.

Also, about the brain one: people with mental illnesses *should* be talking about how strange their brains are. This doesn’t mean they think they’re smart.

Why do I still say “bless you” at all? I don’t know. I certainly don’t think I am preventing the soul from fleeing the body. It may be one of the few examples of unadulterated submissiveness to cultural convention in which I am involved.

Tania: do not think that I claim to have any justice on my side! Anyway, it’s very different if a person chooses to walk slowly, rather than has actual physical limitations on speed.

Also, the kind of discussion of one’s brain you mention is, of course, legitimate, and is very different from what I mean.

I’m talking more about, “OMG, I woke up this morning and my brain had mashed together the B-52’s ‘Love Shack’ with randomly selected excerpts from the Treaty of Versailles! Bad brain!! Why do you hate me?”

AGAIN. The author does not really claim to have justice on his side, here. Do what you want, masses!

Tom Toles and Ruben Bolling redeem the other 99 percent of political cartoons. Bolling, in particular, does so by making his cartoon only about politics once every three weeks; the rest of the time he lampoons 13-year-olds and the comics page. Also, the Onion’s political cartoonist is quite good example of the genre, even as it tries to dismember it weekly.

On “who does that”: stupid nomos, regulating our lives by punishing outliers using Seinfeld references.

Speaking of that dubious cultural reference point, what’s the deal with ‘squee’, anyway? Do people intend to compare onomatopoeically their expressions of delight with pigs or other animals known to ‘squeal’ but also known not to enunciate the letter ‘l’? (I can’t access urbandictionary.com from where I am, and thus am deprived of the word’s folk definition and etymology.)

@Martin: Your comment cracked me up.

Also, Martin, parenthesis will not foil the Google.

I suggest using the pseudonym “G” which hb awarded you, personally.

That’s okay. I don’t mind future residency directors knowing that I am culturally submissive.

Martin,

I was once chastised by a former girlfriend that my not saying “bless you” was a sign of my general rudeness and inattention to other people’s feelings. While I have since conformed to this convention for likely less than admirable reasons, I have observed that when in company with someone who sneezes, there does appear to be a need to acknowledge this tremendous occurrence before conversation can be resumed. Thus, the persistence of the convention has less to do with blessing someone than with restoring them to polite conversation after their possible brush with death, or at very least, their spraying of nasal mucosa in your general vicinity. Similarly, when yawning people feel the need to cover their mouths, they feel they must hide this impolite biological occurrence. (I think the stifled yawn and the possibl apology for yawning are distinguishable, however, as having particular logical meaning.)

But, if “bless you” bugs you that much, I suggest a revival of the Greek custom about sneezing.

You’re likely right, HB. But here is the true hallmark of my utter submissiveness to Mother Culture: it doesn’t bother me at all. I don’t know what I do, but she asks me to do it, and I follow cheerfully. It’s a brave new world.

I’m not quite sure why it’s a brave new world, since I think people have tended to do things according to culture’s dictates and without thinking. Unless you meant to make a clever comparison between “such people in’t” and those “who do[] that.” If so, bravo.

… one of the few examples of unadulterated submissiveness to cultural convention in which I am involved.

I doubt that very much. Maybe it is one of the more transparently bizarre ones to us while we’re doing it, though. The verbal neck-tie.

Somewhat relatedly, I think, my favorite instance of transparently bizarre (or at least surprisingly deep) commitment to the State is waiting at a red light, even for five or ten seconds, in the middle of the night where it is absolutely clear no one is coming. Usually those lights switch over quickly — thank God — but when one takes just slightly too long, and you creep so slightly forward, wondering if you triggered the sensors in the road, and it’s dark and quiet with nobody around, it is a distinctly uncomfortable predicament. One might call it a phenomenon.

And when you find a place (say, Mississippi) where many people routinely do not wait, the inconsequential violation can be bizarrely startling — startling how differently Law may be understood and manifest, and the experience can inspire reflection on Law’s role in one’s own life.

And an irrelevant P.S.:
What’s the deal with this nervousness over anonymity by legal and medical students? I hear allusions to this all the time — and I have complied with requests by I would guess no fewer than half a dozen Johnnies to have flickr photos featuring them doing nothing illegal or even suggestive removed or made private for fear of various mysterious committees. I’ve seen the news stories about public school teachers with topless photos online losing their jobs or whatever, but is there any precedent for professional rejection over an online conversation? Or is this a radical “safe vs. sorry” calculation?

The Law seems to me a better capitalized word than the State: I think Americans still respect the former more than its enforcer. The red light is also a useful example to me. Bicyclists in this city rarely seem to abide by them, choosing to balance the increased safety of a well-executed red light run against the low likelihood of legal consequences. Is this making us more free, since we are less subject to the Law’s generalized and, thus, frequently incorrect attempts to work good, and are more willing to make judgments for ourselves? Or does our lawlessness oppress us the more by decreasing respect for the Law among everyone around us? To me, as a non-Kantian, it’s a difficult question.

Obviously, there’s a practical solution: change the laws to allow bicyclists to proceed through a stop light when there are no cars or pedestrians in or about to enter the intersection. Aside from erasing the concern about lawlessness, we should be making it easier and safer to ride bicycles, and it’s ridiculous to treat bicyclists as exactly the same as cars for traffic law purposes. It’s purely a legal anachronism. But even Mississippi won’t (and can’t) conform its laws to cover the exceptions its citizens routinely make.

For me, the desire not to have my name show up here is simply the desire not to be be Googleable. I’m slightly concerned that some of the opinions I’ve expressed here might be misunderstood or deemed unpalatable by future employers or critics, but there’s not much help for that now. I’m mostly interested in not having random people (such as the people whom I’ve investigated) be able to find that much out about me. It’s pretty easy for a Robbie Pollack to hide among his nominal doppelgangers but almost impossible G and me.

Do you feel the same way about those who automatically react to sneezes by saying gesundheit?

I’m not overly concerned about what I write being anonymous, especially since I don’t write profanity laced tirades about a boss or something like that which tends to get people in trouble. That said, I do recognize the power of Google and a little prudence that limits that access to me without at the same time affecting how I act online seems a dose of medicine with few side effects. I will say though, that I am very surprised about the pictures that make it to facebook and I’m not at all sure that my colleagues should be posting them in their profiles. Doctoring and beer bongs don’t really mix in my book.

Let me be clear about the sneezing issue: I specifically hate people saying “bless you” (or “gesundheit”) repeatedly. Many of us sneeze at least twice if we sneeze at all. During allergy season, I might sneeze in fits of more than a dozen. The times during those sneezes are surprisingly unpleasant, and the effect of a person saying “bless you” after each time is remarkably obnoxious.

Squee is a comic book by Jhonen Vasquez. That’s why I use it. I also have a good friend whose nickname has been Squee for about 12 years.

the blogmass/monadology disconnect became a little clearer to me with this post, i think.

I totally feel Nate’s pain about the people who say bless you for every sneeze in a sneezing fit. It’s ridiculous and absurd, and then they sort of laugh at you about it, like you were deliberately being funny, and make sighs like they are put out that they had to say thank you seven times.

Tania: I at least was not aware of that use of the word, and I suspect a reference to a specific character escapes Nate’s pet peeve. Certainly I find a version that’s not an exclamation to be less immediately objectionable.

Anne: Why is that? Or, what is the disconnect you see?

I can think of three possible reasons, but I’m pretty ignorant of the particulars at work here.

1) Aesthetics: the blogmass is more willing to accept terms like squee, while Monadology folks cringe at them. (I have no idea whether this is accurate at all, but it seems like a possibility after re-reading this thread.)

2) Proscriptivism: the blogmass doesn’t tend to like it (except when it does), while Monadologists like to try to establish clear categories, even if others of us then point out their flaws. (I’m thinking of this radical usagist, among others.) This post appears to exercise a bit of it.

3) Some other thing I don’t understand, but am inclined to call a misreading: call me crazy, but lists of annoying things seem like a staple of blog chatter, and it hardly seems like elements of this list would be foreign on other blogmass blogs. The original post went to pretty great lengths to demonstrate humility about its content, and Nate’s followed that up twice to emphasize that he’s listing his frailties, not passing final judgment on any of the things above. Sure, he’s passing some judgment, but we all do that all the time. Here, it’s in a context that seems pretty lighthearted and about things that are far from important, so I again find it hard to distinguish the post, substantially, from something I might see on other JOhnny blogs.

Not to speak for Anne, who can certainly speak for herself, but I imagine the things that would make it into the rest of the blogmass’s pet peeves would be very different from the types of things Nate lists here.

mostly the comment was inspired by noticing how many people violated your #2 on just one given day. and what tania said.

they’re just different cultures. this plays into points raised during the recent kerfuffle, but the blogmass is certainly less… prescriptive. that’s a good way of phrasing it, HB. the one sin i find unforgivable is prescriptivism.

So you… prescribe not being prescriptive?

embrace the contradiction!

I’ve got more to say, but not the time at the moment. But this much is clear: you don’t really mean that!

Sedans and bad wine.

Pleased to be back in the less letter-of-law South. I enjoyed speeding today on I-10 a great deal.

Tori: you describe the experience perfectly.

Sedans! Yes! and those fake bits of wood people staple to their windows to make it look like the windows are made from small panes of glass. And curtains that don’t close.

Some of my pet peeves:

People who take their good health for granted and abuse it by, say, smoking cigarrettes.

People who are waiting for me to be “saved” and/or think I’m going to hell.

Hypocrites.

The glares I sometimes get when I park in the handicapped spot. Conversely, when I can’t park in the handicapped spot because someone without a tag/a delivery truck is parked there instead.

People who assume they know what someone else is experiencing.

Etc.

I’m not actually opposed to prescriptivism. I don’t really believe in the etymological fallacy either, except, you know, of the dog-fish sort. What I do believe in is will to power.

I can certainly understand about sneezing, and will accordingly try to be better about it - it’s difficult when the interlocutor doesn’t know when the sneezer is done. (Because I agree that it is extremely important to keep the soul from dissipating through a sneeze) And besides, how many other times in the day you get to bless something in cursing it?

I hear “Who does this?” more than “Who does that?” and thus used to mean that the speaker is conscious of the ridiculousness of the situation.

And I, on the other hand, like hearing other people talk about their minds. It’s interesting to compare what I think about people with what they think about themselves, and if it ever stops being interesting, I just stop paying attention.

A slight quibble: I think “who does that?” is actually used more to point up an action that is considered inherently unacceptable—not to “imply” that the action is “not practiced by a sufficient quantity of people” to be valid.

Tim, thanks for the sedan solidarity. Being out of the Northeast at present, I can’t remember why people would inflict being-cramped upon themselves.

Nate, I really woke up yesterday and thought, you know, I hate sedans and bad wine, and I’m not going to pretend any more. Thank you for letting your peevishness break out just when I was feeling peevish as well. After all, one can buy good wine for $7 from TJ’s. Though I’ll never have the Bronco again, alas.