Dear "The Simpsons."
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I haven't known a world without you.
And for that fact, I consider myself amongst the luckiest.
Perhaps it's the closeness of our ages and the simultaneity
with which we came up in the world,
but it is with you that I feel the strongest connection
amongst any other mid-'90s sitcom.
Truthfully, it wasn't until the fourth grade
that your consequence became apparent.
Like the gummy Venus, you were made
all the more sweet and significant
by your interdiction.
And so prevailingly, let me thank you
for being a cartoon but not such that your presence in my home
was not forbidden.
Or alternatively, thank you to my parents
for not anticipating that my encounters with the quotidian
escapades of a family drawn in yellow
would certainly contribute to my delinquency.
I'm unsure if it was at the lunch table or recess or after
school at the public library or pizza place but rest assured,
it was in some stereotypical mid-'90s suburban setting that
my friends and I would dissect and recall ad infinitum
your depictions of stereotypical mid-'90s suburban settings.
I shudder to think how often employees of Casabella Pizza
were subjected to orders for poison pizza.
But such is the state of one in love,
unconcerned with the opinions of others
rather only with the celebration of
their own intense infatuation.
Significantly in our public celebration, my friends and I
discovered a method for expressing
not only our fondness for you but for each other.
Intimate knowledge of your characteristics and details
of which there are a countless number
signaled a devotion to the social fabric uniting us.
If you could turn to someone and say,
"it's such a beautiful day."
And they'd respond with, "I think I go out the window."
You knew that they were part of the family.
As teenaged boys this is the closest
we'd ever come to expressing the true objects
of our affections, each other.
It was primarily through the coded consumption
of popular media, you chief amongst it,
that we signalled our reliance on
and willingness to sacrifice for one another.
Glavin.
Springfield, by design and probably
a little bit by accident, showed us
much about our own small town.
Transformed from the mundane to some bizarre and occasionally
threatening landscape by the anxieties of adolescence.
Nothing you regularly depicted was normal
because normal doesn't exist.
Normal is a lie invented by politicians and jerks
to help them sleep at night.
And this was a thing that we needed
to understand, desperately.
Your authority figures, your Chief Wiggum, your Monty Burns,
Principal Skinner, and Super Nintendo Chalmers,
though vested with power, suffered
their own significant shortcomings.
They were fallible and human.
And so my own teachers, coaches, and directors
came into focus as multi-dimensional people who
wielded the power they had, not because of that power's
benefits, but sometimes in spite of it.
You show family life as boring, complicated, exciting,
uplifting, but never ordinary because it never is.
Yours is a refutation of the simply moralistic family life.
Sometimes it's downright tragic.
Even Lisa, arguably the most normal character,
is shown constantly navigating the tension
between the expectations that she
has for herself and the reality of her wacky home
life and family, whom she loves very much.
You watch her navigate and embrace those tensions
because she has to because that's what life is,
navigating and embracing these tensions.
Bart, the proud underachiever, is disdainful
of strict suburban standards.
Knowing that he isn't and will never
be the perfect middle class older brother allows
him to cherish his shortcomings, though there are still
plenty of warnings about what would happen
were he to deify them.
Now, I have tried to remain mindful of this,
to find this within myself.
What am I really?
Not what perfect thing do I want to try to fit into?
I work to accept my shortcomings but not gild them.
They are not prizes to be celebrated.
They're features of the landscape to navigate around.
Your media elite are incompetent,
confused, or con-artists, flying by the seat of their pants,
completely oblivious or operating on
some very thinly veiled agenda.
You damn every cultural institution, politics,
religion, media, family, as an effort of haphazard,
though purposeful manipulation, by people
just barely in control.
And in so doing, you implicitly and courageously damn yourself.
Your honesty was empowering, that
is until it became performance.
Where I went to college, there was one TV with cable.
Actually, it was satellite.
So I don't even know if it got local channels.
YouTube and Hulu were but twinklings of inspiration
in the dreams of some programmer.
And so when I said goodbye to my parents and my hometown,
I also said goodbye to you, The Simpsons,
and the 11 to 21 times per week that I
would watch you on broadcast.
And, as tends to be the case, upon graduating college,
the world looked different.
And you were no exception.
Whatever bath of pop culture mundanity
you had dipped a toe into in the early 'oughts
had provided full submersion by my graduation.
Your sharp insights had become dull simulations.
Your incisive observations lazily rearranged tropes.
The Simpsons which greeted me was not merely
the one that I left behind.
And as my affections quickly faded, like swans for Odette,
they became like a malady.
In our rendezvouses, I would struggle to recognize you,
like swan, with the painful and continuous anxiety,
which dwelt in my mind.
I stand by confidently that it is better to have a Simpsoned
and lost than to have never Simpsoned at all.
Jack Gilbert writes in The Great Fires that love does not last
but it is different from the passions that do not last.
Love lasts by not lasting.
And so it's my hope that whatever
serendipities of time and access and interest
allowed me to cross your path exist otherwise
today for other people and other pieces of media,
such that they can know the important and powerful
continuous anxiety of a media love that lasts by not lasting.
And I hope that whenever you experience your final throes
of widely recognized relevancy, whenever they are,
your grander significance is not overshadowed
by your late shortcomings.
This is what we want and how we worry for the things we love,
that they are remembered well and that they
are celebrated the way we each might celebrate them
at their best.
If it were my choice, I would choo-choo-choose
that for you, The Simpsons.
Sincerely, Mike Rugnetta.
Let us know in the comments what media you love.
And if you love Idea Channel, please subscribe.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Lol.
Idk.
Let's see what you guys had to say
about the internet and dialects.
Alexisisnotacar writes about how internet dialects might also
be described as registers, which is another way of describing
a particular use of language in a certain social setting
and a way of self-identifying using it.
And I think, yeah, this makes perfect sense to me
and also relates to a lot of other comments I saw,
specifically ones about jargon, which I always
think of being very technical in nature
and not necessarily about self-identification
and community membership-- though that is certainly
a factor-- and slang, which I always
think of as being very informal, which, yeah,
is also a facet of all of this formality versus informality.
So, yeah, this was a great comment.
Links to this one and all the others, the doobly-doo.
MagicalDragontamer talks about TV Tropes
and how there is a certain manner of speech that
has developed there because of the necessity
to refer to what are slightly more complicated
concepts with frequency and uses ymmv, or your mileage
may vary, as an example of this.
And this is a thing that always struck me
as being really fun and interesting about TV Tropes is
this kind of compressed style of speaking, where there are still
lots of information and lots of high concept
but it's boiled down into these much smaller units, which
I, probably for obvious reasons, really enjoy.
So, yeah.
TheJaredthe Jaredlong offers YouTube comments
as a possible home for general American internet version.
And Cian counters that that might
be true of every very popular website.
And this makes me think of two things, the first being
that, like we said in the video, it's always
a little complicated to say that every user on a website
behaves in a certain way.
But that also because a website is so popular
and is such a constant part of our media consumption,
it's really easy, I think, to lose track of what
characteristics are novel.
It's like that saying, we don't know who discovered water
but you can bet it wasn't a fish.
I think that that applies here.
Eric Vilas and Rieja Thorn point out
that there aren't just website speech communities
but there are also fandom specific speech communities
and even go so far as to write comments
that are kind of a performance of code
switching between those two communities.
And it's so good.
Also I really want to hang out on the K-pop fandom internet.
It sounds like a great place.
And speaking of code switching, Ilmari Thornton
brings up code switching as a very important aspect
of communicating to different communities,
even though you are one person.
And that is what this is called.
When you communicate in a different way
to different places, you are code switching,
which is a thing we talked about just
not by name, which was silly that I
didn't say code switching.
That's what it is.
Creatrix Tiara points out that this video
made onto MetaFilter, which is very
exciting because the conversation there is always
really good.
So if you want to see what the people in MetaFilter
have to say about internet dialects,
sling in the doodly-doo.
Shanti de Ruyter, whose name I'm sure I'm destroying--
so I want to apologize, Shanti-- writes a really great comment
about friend groups needing shorthand
for shared experiences.
And that this is maybe one reason
that speech communities develop online
and that you still need to do this
but you are effectively doing it in a public space.
So your shorthand for a shared experience
is shared with effectively a ton of people in a very large room.
And I think that this is one of the really exciting things
about communicating with large communities and groups online.
You kind of get into this that you
can experience this excitement of belonging
with a person based upon understanding
like a piece of shorthand or a reference that they're making,
even though you've never met them
and that they are halfway across or all
the way across the world, you can still feel that.
You can still feel like you are in a group together.
And that's fun.
Yay Internet, I guess is what I'm going to say.
This week's episode was brought to you
by the hard work of these perfectly cromulent
individuals.
We have a Facebook and IRC and a sub-Reddit links
in the doobly-doo.
And the Tweets of the week come from Uncreative Cat,
who links us to an Esquire piece about the ever-changing accent
and the sort of embodiment of code switching
and gentrification, who links us to an article
about the uncovering of a global super dialect via Twitter,
which is just crazy.
And I also spoke with Rae from The Daily Dot
about our dialects episode.
So we'll put a link to that in the doobly-doo as well.
And for this week's record swap, we are not actually
going to be swapping a record.
We only have two left.
It's The Highwaymen, which you probably can't even see.
And a Sword and Sorcery, which I really
want to make sure that we replace
with something really good.
So I'm feeling like a lot of pressure to get it right.
I'm feeling a little paralyzed.
So if you have any suggestions, I would love to hear them.