Who Sawed Courtney's Boat
Feb. 25th, 2007 11:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lydyI would like to make an argument for the faanish in-joke. Several people have spoken passionately about the way in which fandom is too clique-ish and how our use of in-jokes excludes new comers.
I think they're wrong.
In-jokes are not a bad thing. They are not a way of excluding people. They are the inevitable and necessary product of building a community. Every community develops its own in-jokes, its own short hand, and the difference between one and the other is, especially in fandom, constantly being blurred. Our sense of humor, our love of the verbal dance, makes this inescapable.
I worked as a secretary in the Bone Marrow Transplant office a while ago. As is common in every medical field, most patients were referred to by their disease, not their name. This led to conversations which I found hilarious.
"This is the fifth breast this week. What is this, a fire sale on breasts?"
"I don’t know what it is, we seem to have breasts coming out of the walls."
"I don’t know what it is with all these breasts. They’re so crabby."
"Jane has three breasts today. I don’t know how she’s going to manage them all."
"We just had two breasts walk in together. I don’t know how we can fit them both in." [I asked where was the bar.]
"Jane isn’t going to be in on the 20th. Do you think George could handle a breast?" (By the way, George handled the breast just fine. He said later, "I just said breast every time I wanted to say CML.")
If you're me, you're laughing. If you're one of the nurses or secretaries, you're staring at me trying to figure out what the joke is. And if I tell you, you'll look at me a bit puzzled, and say, "But, that's just an abbreviation." These are smart, wise, clever people, but they don't know who sawed Courtney's boat.
That damn boat. You know, I'd been in fandom fifteen years before I heard someone say it? I thought, yet one more oddity to stack up on all the other oddities when talking to fen. Hey, what's another spot to a leopard. (And this, if you were in SFLIS at the right time, is in in-joke. It's also boring, so I won't bother you with the story.)
In-jokes. In-jokes are metastasized shop talk. These days, we fen say, "I'm just explaining to be polite." That was a fascinating insight nine years ago. These days, it's an in-joke, and most of us don't even know it. It's an abbreviation for a concept.* More than shop talk, in-jokes are part of what bind a community together. In-jokes that are intended to be excluding are the ones that people won't to explain. Of fandom's many faults, this is not one. Ask us a question and we'll try to answer. Ask us about an in-joke and you'll get a disquisition which goes all the way back to Hugo Gernsback. TMI, thy name is fandom.
Remember Amalgamated Spleen? (Another Minicon reference, they've since moved to CONvergence, and I don't know if they're still functioning. I hope so.) As I understood their sales rep. (and I may not have), the thing started off as an in-joke with him and a couple of his friends. Then they put up a huge number of extremely clever posters all over Minicon, and the posters were admired, collected, pointed out, complimented, and were generally just a gas. Total smashing success. An in-joke that metastasized. They kept it up for a couple of years, developed contracts and donation cards, it was great, it was clever, and it had staying power. These days, where I hang out, they are a fond remembrance.
What is the real difference between a fond reminisce and an in-joke? Near as I can tell, the difference is that a reminisce is longer. If you're standing around talking with people, and say, "Remember the con where Madman dove into the shallow end of the pool, twice? Second time, we had to run him to the hospital. Seventeen stitches, wasn't it?" and your companion nods and laughs, how different is this from saying "Yeah, but who sawed Courtney's boat, anyway?" in response to a comment about the oddness of the English language. Lime jello is an in-joke, but it's about a dozen different jokes, near as I can tell. I've heard more stories about why lime jello is funny as a leopard has spots. Can it be an in-joke if people don't even know which joke they're telling?
These are the words that bind. These are the ways that we find and hold each other. And this is the mistake I made during our Boskone-style melt-down. This is the divide that I helped create. I wanted people to learn my in-jokes, but I never asked them about theirs. I didn't care to learn them, and some of them seemed to me to be heresy, replacing one of my words with one of theirs. I was protecting the purity of the language against the Vandals and Visigoths.
Having in-jokes isn't exclusionary. Not wanting to know someone else's is exclusionary. In hind sight, I can't imagine how I missed it. We were in the same pickle. They wanted us to understand them, we wanted them to understand us, they wanted control over the language and the jokes, we wanted control over the language and the jokes.
This is an incredibly simplistic view of the melt-down, by the way.
To sum up, in-jokes are important, and most fan feuds are about semantics. So there. That's what I've learned in the last ten years.**
I do hope you'll correct me, if only to be polite. :-)
*At Minicon 34 or so, Elise Mattheson's sister, who specializes in language work with autistic children (I think I've got that right), gave an speech in which she described and demonstrated characteristics of the fannish lect. (Kind of like a dialect, only much smaller.) One of the things that she said was that in the rest of the world, if your response to someone's statement is to correct them, then their response will be dismay. They will feel as if they're being lectured or publicly embarrassed. If you do it to a fan, most likely the fan will say, "Thank you, that's what I meant," and move on. The phrase started out as "I'm just correcting you to be polite." These days, we also say "just explaining." I'm pretty sure that most of us use it without realizing that, out of context, it is probably bewildering, and possibly rude.
Fans are often thought to over-explain.
**This post subject to editing as people convince me that I'm wrong. Full retraction is possible but unlikely.
I think they're wrong.
In-jokes are not a bad thing. They are not a way of excluding people. They are the inevitable and necessary product of building a community. Every community develops its own in-jokes, its own short hand, and the difference between one and the other is, especially in fandom, constantly being blurred. Our sense of humor, our love of the verbal dance, makes this inescapable.
I worked as a secretary in the Bone Marrow Transplant office a while ago. As is common in every medical field, most patients were referred to by their disease, not their name. This led to conversations which I found hilarious.
"This is the fifth breast this week. What is this, a fire sale on breasts?"
"I don’t know what it is, we seem to have breasts coming out of the walls."
"I don’t know what it is with all these breasts. They’re so crabby."
"Jane has three breasts today. I don’t know how she’s going to manage them all."
"We just had two breasts walk in together. I don’t know how we can fit them both in." [I asked where was the bar.]
"Jane isn’t going to be in on the 20th. Do you think George could handle a breast?" (By the way, George handled the breast just fine. He said later, "I just said breast every time I wanted to say CML.")
If you're me, you're laughing. If you're one of the nurses or secretaries, you're staring at me trying to figure out what the joke is. And if I tell you, you'll look at me a bit puzzled, and say, "But, that's just an abbreviation." These are smart, wise, clever people, but they don't know who sawed Courtney's boat.
That damn boat. You know, I'd been in fandom fifteen years before I heard someone say it? I thought, yet one more oddity to stack up on all the other oddities when talking to fen. Hey, what's another spot to a leopard. (And this, if you were in SFLIS at the right time, is in in-joke. It's also boring, so I won't bother you with the story.)
In-jokes. In-jokes are metastasized shop talk. These days, we fen say, "I'm just explaining to be polite." That was a fascinating insight nine years ago. These days, it's an in-joke, and most of us don't even know it. It's an abbreviation for a concept.* More than shop talk, in-jokes are part of what bind a community together. In-jokes that are intended to be excluding are the ones that people won't to explain. Of fandom's many faults, this is not one. Ask us a question and we'll try to answer. Ask us about an in-joke and you'll get a disquisition which goes all the way back to Hugo Gernsback. TMI, thy name is fandom.
Remember Amalgamated Spleen? (Another Minicon reference, they've since moved to CONvergence, and I don't know if they're still functioning. I hope so.) As I understood their sales rep. (and I may not have), the thing started off as an in-joke with him and a couple of his friends. Then they put up a huge number of extremely clever posters all over Minicon, and the posters were admired, collected, pointed out, complimented, and were generally just a gas. Total smashing success. An in-joke that metastasized. They kept it up for a couple of years, developed contracts and donation cards, it was great, it was clever, and it had staying power. These days, where I hang out, they are a fond remembrance.
What is the real difference between a fond reminisce and an in-joke? Near as I can tell, the difference is that a reminisce is longer. If you're standing around talking with people, and say, "Remember the con where Madman dove into the shallow end of the pool, twice? Second time, we had to run him to the hospital. Seventeen stitches, wasn't it?" and your companion nods and laughs, how different is this from saying "Yeah, but who sawed Courtney's boat, anyway?" in response to a comment about the oddness of the English language. Lime jello is an in-joke, but it's about a dozen different jokes, near as I can tell. I've heard more stories about why lime jello is funny as a leopard has spots. Can it be an in-joke if people don't even know which joke they're telling?
These are the words that bind. These are the ways that we find and hold each other. And this is the mistake I made during our Boskone-style melt-down. This is the divide that I helped create. I wanted people to learn my in-jokes, but I never asked them about theirs. I didn't care to learn them, and some of them seemed to me to be heresy, replacing one of my words with one of theirs. I was protecting the purity of the language against the Vandals and Visigoths.
Having in-jokes isn't exclusionary. Not wanting to know someone else's is exclusionary. In hind sight, I can't imagine how I missed it. We were in the same pickle. They wanted us to understand them, we wanted them to understand us, they wanted control over the language and the jokes, we wanted control over the language and the jokes.
This is an incredibly simplistic view of the melt-down, by the way.
To sum up, in-jokes are important, and most fan feuds are about semantics. So there. That's what I've learned in the last ten years.**
I do hope you'll correct me, if only to be polite. :-)
*At Minicon 34 or so, Elise Mattheson's sister, who specializes in language work with autistic children (I think I've got that right), gave an speech in which she described and demonstrated characteristics of the fannish lect. (Kind of like a dialect, only much smaller.) One of the things that she said was that in the rest of the world, if your response to someone's statement is to correct them, then their response will be dismay. They will feel as if they're being lectured or publicly embarrassed. If you do it to a fan, most likely the fan will say, "Thank you, that's what I meant," and move on. The phrase started out as "I'm just correcting you to be polite." These days, we also say "just explaining." I'm pretty sure that most of us use it without realizing that, out of context, it is probably bewildering, and possibly rude.
Fans are often thought to over-explain.
**This post subject to editing as people convince me that I'm wrong. Full retraction is possible but unlikely.
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Re: Who Sawed Courtney's Boat
Date: 2007-02-26 10:39 am (UTC)an injoke is different from a reminisce in so far as an outsider listening can usually understand more of a reminisce without having to ask for an explanation, and that's easier to deal with for a painfully shy introvert new to a group of people. a reminisce leaves more obvious room for asking questions as well, and appears therefore more friendly towards outsiders joining the conversation.
but i forgive fandom for its injokes because it is so eager to explain if i but ask. that's way better than most cliques are. and while some small sections of fandom might be quite exclusionary, fandom overall doesn't strike me that way at all. none of the usual barriers apply, which is refreshing. yes, there is the love of the verbal dance, and i am sure that's a problem for those who don't delight in words, but being as i do, that doesn't bother me. there is no group on earth that doesn't exclude people by its very nature.
"I'm just explaining to be polite." is actually _the_ injoke that makes me consider that i might be a fan myself. :)
no subject
Date: 2007-02-26 11:27 am (UTC)K.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-26 01:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-26 02:48 pm (UTC)The people who get upset about injokes sound very much to me like a variation on a theme of the neopro who is upset that their favorite author is talking to some utter nobody rather than the illustrious and promising young neopro: people have friends other than oneself. People who are old enough to attend cons under their own power should have far longer-term friends than oneself. This is not a bad thing.
Re: Who Sawed Courtney's Boat
Date: 2007-02-26 03:56 pm (UTC)K.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-26 05:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-27 12:16 am (UTC)Interesting.
Language, tough stuff, language.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-27 12:28 am (UTC)I think this is true of all groups and societies, from couples' "private language" to corporate in-speak to societal references, or should I say allusions? One varying factor I see is reinforcement: the larger the group, the more reinforcement is needed to reach a point where most of the people in a given sub-set conversation are likely to know the in-joke. Among fen (or my gamestore geeks) there's a high percentage of intelligent, detail oriented people who are likely to remember and use an event as a referent in conversation, which establishes context and usage for those who weren't there, or heard the story third hand, or what-have-you. So it's easier to establish an injoke in that group than in general society, and they're more likely to continue using it as conversational short-hand.
Which leads into the other varying factor I see: the "shelf-life" of an in-joke. Jokes like 'all your base' and 'orly' have come and gone (hopefully) but fandom perpetuates injokes from its infancy. The only other groups I know of that have jokes of such staying power are families and close groups of friends--but since fandom has strong aspects of both of those groups I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
Someone entering fandom has literally decades of shared language to learn, and there's no sure way of identifying someone's fluency with that language other than to make a reference, look for confusion, and explain if necessary. Off-putting sure, but not purposeful exclusion. Most of the time anyway.
Thank you for the intriguing topic! I needed something to wrap my mind around after the day I had today.
Re: Who Sawed Courtney's Boat
Date: 2007-02-27 02:34 am (UTC)The other thing about in-jokes is that they can act as pheremones. If you say, "I'm just correcting you to be polite," and the personn you're talking to gets the joke without explanation, then they're likely to be a neo-fan. They're more likely to want to get to know the group, and we're more likely to want to continue getting to know the person. Some of the really obscure ones, like "Who sawed Courtney's joke?" -- hmm, I mistyped boat but I think I'll let it stand, it can't be the first time that variation has been used. Wait, now where was I. Oh, right, in-jokes being pheremones. The pattern of jokes, and the willingness to explain, I think probably constitute and early warning system.
(And for in-jokes, it occurs to me that there's a whole set of in-jokes from the Cold War that don't make sense to people born after about 1980. Fandom is heavily weighted towards the baby boomers, which is no one's fault but is also a characteristic which cannot be rectified. That means that on top of everything else, there's a set of cultural in-jokes that are inaccessible to many neo-fen, just because they're younger. I have listened, many times and in many states of consciousness, to Firesign Theater. They're not funny to me. The kind of minute details they refer to just don't strike me that way. Most of them I don't know, the rest I'm missing context for.
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Date: 2007-02-27 02:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-28 01:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-28 02:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-01 07:40 am (UTC)MKK
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Date: 2007-03-02 04:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-02 07:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-02 07:21 am (UTC)So, I have to ask. 1) Did that make sense? 2) Was that more than you wanted to know? 3) I have no third question but I must ask, since questions come in threes, fives, sevens, and nines. Rarely in fives, by the way. I could explain why I think these are the prime magical numbers, if you care. Three is the most common. Oh, I guess question 3 could have been, "And what about...Naomi?" but this is a joke that is so obscure that even fans don't get it. It appears to be an in-joke for the pleasure of exactly one, that is to say, me. Have I hit the totally too much information bit, yet?
no subject
Date: 2007-03-02 08:49 am (UTC)1) Yes, mostly. 2) No. 3) I could listen to you ramble on all night.
"had his boat sawed in such a way that it was not sea worthy" is a construction that had my brain wandering off looking for some nautical meaning for the word "sawed" perhaps having something to do with sail rigging. Which reaction I guess is kin to the original joke in a way.
The thing that fascinates me about fandom (and I'm more a fan of fandom than a member of the ranks) is how it can sustain so much conversation. I've so far not been able to catch the knack of free association and silencing the self-censor enough to feel capable as a conversationalist. In social settings I rely on a lurker's ability to monitor discussion waiting for the moment when I can insert the punchline of an in-joke to get a laugh. When I have to lead in a conversation, I tend to compress a story so far down to bare essentials that it becomes a simple statement that offers no discernable shape for my partners to base their next steps on.
Maybe the proliferation of in-jokes is a way to vamp, waiting for the conversational flow to come back around on the guitar. Or (and) a way for those less gifted in the art to insert relevant grace notes in the tune. Or maybe that's just me.
Now that you mention it, I wonder why five isn't as usual a number of questions as three or seven.
Back on in-jokes, does google dilute their potency? If I don't have to ask what a strange phrase means then what's the value in having used it?
no subject
Date: 2007-03-02 09:37 am (UTC)Was it Yogi Berra who said you've got to get up pretty early in the morning.
My theory of sacred numbers, as pulled of my ass at 3 am
One is the number of God.
Three, the most commonly used holy number, is the number of the trinity
Five, is a prime, and primes show the power of god over matter.
Nine is three threes. Three, being the trinity, is arguably the most holyy unless you're building something large. In that case, it's 12s, the multipe of three times 4, the trinity of god multiplied by the four powers of the earth.
Hey, maybe the numerologists will correct me. That'd be coll.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-02 11:02 am (UTC)What about seven?
There's a prime directive joke in here somewhere.
And what about...Naomi? Looks like she's Jake and Maggie's mom. I know I watched The Electric Company, but I don't remember a thing about it.
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Date: 2007-03-02 02:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-02 09:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-02 09:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-03 01:25 am (UTC)James Nicoll, (which is attributed to rec.arts.sf-lovers and rec.arts.comics, but I'm pretty sure I first read on rec.arts.sf.fandom.)
no subject
Date: 2007-03-03 01:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-03 03:00 pm (UTC)Eight hits (8), and this very page was #1. Not much help.
Balticon 32 Panels lists:
The Secret Handgrip of Fandom, Lime Jell-O, and Who Sawed Courtney's Boat: Faanish History; Or, How You Too Can Talk Like An Old-timer. and trust me, the other two are way more fun, though too large to fit into this comment. Say hi to me at Minicon.
Noreascon Four Exhibits' Pillar Quotes includes it with a whole bunch of stiff, mixing great lines from stories and fannish whatnot.
The Metaphysics of Professionalism(!!) concludes:
So the next time the discussion in a fanzine turns to whether a magazine is a prozine, semi-prozine or a fanzine or whether a piece of writing is of professional quality, or what it takes to write something professional, you'd be better off ignoring the gibberish and concentrating on problems more susceptible to solution -- like who sawed Courtney's boat or whether Yngvi really was a louse.
Meanwhile, I've been in fandom nearly forty years (you cannot conceive the astonishment with which I calculate that), and I have no clue what the hell "Who sawed Courtney's boat?" means, but you do keep hearing it.
if you want to know, spend
Date: 2007-03-03 06:20 pm (UTC)K.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-03 06:21 pm (UTC)K.
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Date: 2007-03-03 07:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-03 11:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-03 11:14 pm (UTC)The trigger for this was probably what you said here: "Having in-jokes isn't exclusionary. Not wanting to know someone else's is exclusionary." Maybe the way I found fandom was that the sheer delight of discovering others who loved word play and weird humor made me want to join, automatically. Nowadays social boundaries are looser in some ways (MTV as homogenizing force? Also, I'm no longer a teenager), so that the act of simply finding a like-minded group isn't enough to make me want to join in.
Good post, and good conversation. It ties in with my (as yet unwritten) article on the roof as the introduction and how that works in fandom. (And then there the so many ideas in my head, and so few of them in actual words.)
no subject
Date: 2007-03-03 11:31 pm (UTC)The problem with the long-term in-jokes is that they do build up. I've been around various types of fans for decades, now, and I still don't know all the references. But I think you're spot on when you talk about how they last longest in families and close groups of friends.
Sometimes I'm very happy about how quickly culture can get around these days. I was talking with some fans in New Zealand, and the conversation didn't really get going until we started on Monty Python. (And I consider myself an Anglophile, with more knowledge of British humor than most folks in the States. That still wasn't enough.)
Re: Who Sawed Courtney's Boat
Date: 2007-03-04 01:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-04 01:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-04 01:40 pm (UTC)She might, she might. You could certainly test this theory by bringing a BEM home to visit her sometime. A careful study of the covers of early pulp scientifiction magazines suggests there is a time-honored and proven technique for attracting BEMs, dont'chaknow…
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Date: 2007-03-04 01:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-04 01:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-04 01:54 pm (UTC)Not yacht. Shell. Rowing. [A sport that certainly lends itself to any number of horrible puns. (Our crew didn't do so well today. Seems they were out all last night partying with the oars…)] At one of the Eastern "prestige" schools, yes. I believe I read about it in one of Harry Warner, Jr.'s histories of fandom: All Our Yesterdays or A Wealth of Fable, but the books are out of reach at the moment so I cannot check on further details. More mumbling to follow in my LJ, Real Soon Now.
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Date: 2007-03-04 01:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-04 02:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-04 02:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-06 12:14 am (UTC)HUGO GERNSBACK
Date: 2007-05-13 04:59 pm (UTC)http://www.amazon.com/Hugo-Gernsback-Well-Ahead-Time/dp/1419658573/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-7652021-9294241?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1179073017&sr=8-1
Questions? Contact me at PoptronixInc@aol.com