5 things I'm musing-muddling about right now:

[capri0mni]

Tell me in comments which I should expand upon in a real, full-blown post... Please?

• I wonder if my cerebral palsy effects or alters my personal concept of "ego" and "Self" in any significant way, since deciding to move/do something is one thing, but then, actually doing it requires a cascade of micro-adjustments disentangling intended actions from unintended ones. Does this mean that my intuitive sense of "Will" is different from someone who can do things automatically?
  
  
• Spelling songs (B-I-N-G-O, etc.): What's their appeal, and why hasn't there been a song about Qwerty, yet?
  
  
• Why do mass media cater to hipsters, and treat geeks as second-class citizens, especially in entertainment? And which came first? Do you need a mass entertainment media industry to create the hipster class?
  
  
• Why is "Alphabetic order" in Alphabetic order? When a discrete set of visual symbols for phonemes was first developed, what was the thought process behind putting "Alpha" first, "Beta" next, and "Omega" last (Fill in the letter names with the linguistic system of your choice)?
  
  
• Back in the day, the crippled god Hephaestus was believed to have a full sex drive, but all the able-bodied goddesses (and mortal women, presumably) found him so repulsive that (according to myth) he had to resort to rape to satisfy his lusts -- that's where the cyclops(es) came from. And there's Caliban from The Tempest, too, who was thwarted by Prospero in raping Miranda. So when did the idea enter our culture that the physically disabled are asexual, and of course we are eternal children, and have no sexual desires? Was that a Nineteenth Century Charity thing?

So, yeah. That's all the stuff that's rattling around in my head...

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

All good; 1 and 5 are great. (We could have tons o fun in comments with 3 & 4).

[capri0mni]

Well, with 5, I'm kind of waiting for my dwircle's resident Disability Historian to come back, since I think she might have useful insights.

[pebblerocker]

Is it an alphabet of... some writing system used somewhere like India?... where the order of letters is completely by phonology -- all the vowels together in logical progression, all the affricatives, and so on. I like that. Ours looks like it was thrown together at random: J is a bit like I, U and V and W are similar, so we'll put them together, everything else is in a jumble and other new inventions get bunged on at the end.

What's the longest spelling-out song? Currently listening to Connie Francis singing V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N, haha. I'm thinking of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, but that's not the same thing.

[capri0mni]

I don't know if it counts as having the longest word spelled, but it's certainly in the running for having the highest percentage of lyrics spelled: Billy Conolly's take on D-I-V-O-R-C-E

[chronographia]

4. The thing you are looking for is a history of typography and/or palaeography. Because this has been researched LOTS. For example, the letter Z is at the end of our alphabet because, when the Romans adapted the alphabet from the Greeks, it was the fifth letter, but they decided that they did not need it and axed it. Time passes and they realize that they do in fact need it, and so it got stuck back on. At the end. And it hasn't moved in our Latin alphabet since.

(That is one of my favorite bits of useless trivia, acquired via my fine arts degree.)

[capri0mni]

Hee! That's one of the best reasons to get a fine arts degree. Ever!

So, all this is very interesting... But why did the Greeks decide to put Zeta fifth?

Why did the letters have fixed positions in the writing system, in the first place? I mean, it's all very useful for looking things up in the dictionary, and all, but alphabets have been around a lot longer than dictionaries and phone books, and voter registration lines...

I mean, did the very first paleographer have that much foresight to say: "Gee, now that we have an alphabet, folks will want to alphabetize things, 5,000 years from now, so let's put these in some sort of order."?