Hey Rube! and other archaic knowledge

[Desdichado]

By 1950 the geeks had undermined themselves by creating a diseminatable visual arts culture, spawning the modern celebrity culture and creating 'fame' as we now it. Although there are great players before Babe Ruth, prior to the Babe Ruth era few people could follow the exploits of a great athelete. And, I think you underestimate the celebrity status of Albert Einstein.

No, that's not true. Lord Byron was a celebrity of exactly the fashion you're talking about over a hundred years earlier. He may have been the first person to be "famous for being famous" but there was a hardly a hundred year gap between the next one.

I think you're overly romanticizing the early 20th century if you think kids routinely thought of scientists as celebrities.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

The geniuses have never been widely famous or idealized. Einstein's a notable exception, and there a few others here and there, but they are by and far exceptions and not the rule.

Leonardo da Vinci? I honestly don't know.

But I believe in my heart that the ancient Greeks would have idolized their great thinkers (while keeping them distinct from their great mythological heroes, who I suppose enjoyed an adulation similar to what we consider Fame).

 

[TheAuldGrump]

I never had any problem with the phrases chosen, but then it is likely that I was reading much the same fantasy stories that Gygax and others were drawing upon. Poul Anderson, L. Sprague deCamp, Fletcher Pratt, and Anthony Boucher were all nerds, and proud of it. The fantasy fiction of the 1940s reflected this. To folks growing up with these stories the terms were not obscure, but comfortably familiar.

I just looked at that list and realized that they are now all dead and gone.

The Auld Grump, ya shout's Hey Rube when some town Johnny starts a Clem.

*EDIT* Though 'dog-eared' is still in common usage - the corner of a page folded down to look like dog ears.

 

[Bullgrit]

Really? People aren't familiar with the phrase dog-eared?

Though 'dog-eared' is still in common usage - the corner of a page folded down to look like dog ears.

How old were you when you heard/read "dog eared" for the very first time? I was 13 or 14 years old, reading a D&D module.

Although it's stylish to say that text should "challenge" the reader, you have to keep in mind what the text is and the way the reader will use that text.

For instance, challenging text in a novel is different than that same text in an instruction book. And a D&D rule book/module is sort of a mixture of novel and instructions.

A young teenager reading, for the very first time ever, a reference to a "dog-eared deck of cards" in a novel gets glossed over if it's not understood. No harm, no foul.

A young teenager DM describing to his Players a deck of cards made of dog ears is a little more funny. Possibly embarrassing for the DM, possibly completely confusing to the Players.

So stretching and challenging a reader's vocabulary is all well and fine in novels or textbooks, but in something designed for 10-12 year olds to read and understand well enough to run on their own (like Basic D&D supposedly was) -- without the breadth of knowledge and experience of a 30-50 year old prodigious reader -- sometimes you should dial down the archaic language and references.

Fortunately, the instances of such language and references weren't so numerous as to be a major problem (no more than an occasional hiccup, really).

Bullgrit

 

[Raven Crowking]

AFAICT, "dog-eared" isn't archaic; I have heard it used often throughout my life. Of course, I grew up in Wisconsin, so this might have been more regional at the time.

The 1e DMG, OTOH, taught me "sycophant", which is a great & useful word to know.

(Even when I was younger, I had access to a dictionary, and could look things up.)



RC

 

[Henry]

Gygax taught me Militocracies, Geriatocracies, and Magocracies.

Oh, wait, he made that one up...

 

[Desdichado]

How old were you when you heard/read "dog eared" for the very first time? I was 13 or 14 years old, reading a D&D module.

I dunno. I don't remember a time when I wasn't familiar with the phrase and heard it in casual conversation and in a lot of stuff I've read over the years both.

I mean, I get the gist of your post, I'm just surprised that that's an example. That's a pretty common term in my experience.

:shrug:

Although it's stylish to say that text should "challenge" the reader, you have to keep in mind what the text is and the way the reader will use that text.

A text should only challenge the reader if that's the purpose for which it's being written. I disagree strongly with the notion that the purpose of the DMG or whatever was to "challenge" the readers. If it did so, that's because Gygax's overly affected writing style combined with the possibly unexpected popularity of D&D with pre-adolescent boys was just a bad mix.

 

[JoeNotCharles]

In the module Secret of the Slavers Stockade, the text mentions there's a "dog-eared deck of cards" on a table. I had never heard of anything "dog-eared," and since the cards belonged to a bunch of terrible and nasty humanoids, I assumed the cards were actually made of dogs' ears. Fortunately, I didn't go 30 years before learning what this meant.

If it says "dog-eared" - clearly an adjective - why would you think they were made of dog ears? You don't say that an iron breastplate is "ironed". A "dog ear deck of cards" might make sense for what you were thinking, but it'd still be a really weird way to phrase it.

If I hadn't known what dog-eared meant, I'd have assumed all the face cards had pictures of people with dogs ears. Like they were all gnolls or something.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

I have to agree. While I learned a lot of new words from Gary, "Dog-eared" and "Rube" are not among them. They were both in common usage when I was growing up. A rube was someone who'd trade you a Mickey Mantle card for a Willy Stargell, just because he was born in Pittsburgh. Dog-eared was either the page turned down in a book, or it could refer to anything worn and ragged, as dogs ears are one of the first things dogs target in a dog fight, and they take a long time to heal - dogs can have cut, torn, and ragged ears forever from one scrap in the backyard.

Ochre and Milieu are a different story.

 

[Desdichado]

Ochre is just red dirt. I'm pretty sure I knew that word from my crayon box long before I knew it from D&D.

I might have learned mileu from D&D. :shrug: Or from Monty Python.