Ricochet Rabbit

I looked up the word cranky. It said grouchy. I looked up grouchy. It said crotchety. No wonder you have such an eccentric culture: none of your words have their own meanings. You have to look up one word to understand another. It never ends.

J. Michael Straczynski, Babylon 5, And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place

It’s been pointed out to me, most recently by my parents (of all people), that I tend to communicate in allusions. (D’oh!) I don’t think this is particularly unique: many of my friends have similar reference points and refer to them often. This isn’t a huge issue most of the time, but it does wind up excluding others from conversations… and some people get a little cranky because we do it so much.

Sometimes we even out-allude each other. It took me the longest time to figure out that Impressive… most impressive. was an Empire Strikes Back reference, even though I’ve seen it many times. I tend to reply in these situations with yet another allusion, the oddly-appropriate Sorry old man, we don’t understand your banter.

Occasionally I’ll go further, alluding to a reference that’s twice or three times removed from the current topic. More often than not I get a lot of blank stares (well, more than usual, anyway) until I explain the tangents that led to the apparent non sequitur.

All of which is why the web in general, and blogging in particular, can be so liberating: we communicate naturally in hypertext. In conversation you need shared references; in a blog you can just drop a link to a source around the body of your allusive text and you’re done–if someone gets the joke he’ll ignore it, and if he doesn’t he can follow it up easily. (The examples above are hardly obscure references. Better examples come from an earlier post in which I referred to lyrics from Happy Birthday by Weird Al Yankovic, my blog categories, and a good number of my post titles.)

(It’s also interesting to note that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, allusion used to refer to wordplay and punning. I particularly like one of the OED’s citations, which refers Adolescens [sic] to a Greek word meaning fond of chit-chat.)