Author: Duncan
Super-Vision
supervision. [soo-per-vizh-uhn] -noun.
1. the act or function of supervising.
2. a heightened sense of sight often possessed by superheroes. Seahorseman foiled The Urchin’s evil plot by using his supervision.
supervisor. [soo-per-vahy-zer] -noun.
1. a person who supervises workers or the work done by others.
2. a visor worn by crazed individuals who seek superhuman eyesight. With this supervisor equipped I can now take over Nigeria!
Slogging
Walking is boring. If you have ever enjoyed a walk, it was because of the scenery or the company, not because walking itself is an enjoyable activity. Walking is merely the basic unassisted method of transportation that humans use to get from one place to another, but it can be so much more.
Normal walking requires your feet and hands to alternate their swing so that the weight of your extended leg is counterbalanced by your arm on the opposite side. When your right leg extends, your left hand will swing forward so that your body moves in rhythmic and stable motion. Boring.
Next time you have to walk somewhere, try spicing things up by swinging your right arm forward when your right leg extends. The result is a hilarious and unnatural bipedal motion which will surely brighten up your travels; this is known as slogging. Your first attempt will have to be slow because your body will want to revert to regular walking. Do not allow your body to tell you how to walk. Once you have a solid grasp of how your arms and legs should move, you may want to experiment with running in this fashion, as this will undoubtedly lead to laughter at your own foolishness.
Don’t walk, slog.
Teamship
Everyone has experienced that special connection with another person – the knowledge that you will always be able to count on each other. We call this connection friendship. We use this word to describe our relationship with a person that we consider our friend. But what about that intense sense of brotherhood and trust that develops between teammates, what do we call that? Surely there must be a word that describes the bonds forged in the heat of battle on a hockey rink, basketball court or soccer field. Now there is.
teamship. [teem-ship] -noun.
1. the state of being a member of a team. We are considering her for teamship this year.
2. a feeling shared between team members. The Wolf-Dogs have great teamship.
3. a relation which shares team-like attributes.
If you ever feel like you and your friend just make a great duo, that’s teamship. If your friends know you so well that they can anticipate your actions, that’s teamship. When, without words, you crouch behind someone while your friend shoves that person so they fall over you, that’s teamship. Take that, Grandma!
So go ahead and try it out. Once this word works its way into your vocabulary you will wonder how you ever got along without it.
Forced Abstract Relation
The human mind is a beautiful machine. It can record and playback sounds and images, perform calculations and generate original thoughts and ideas. Although the brain is capable of so many wonderful things, it is outperformed in nearly every area by modern computers. There is, however, one function that a computer cannot do: comprehend abstract ideas. No matter how much information we feed into a program, it cannot grasp the philosophical ramifications of that information or explain how it relates to the life of a human being. This is where the human brain excels. In fact, our brains are so good at thinking abstractly, that we can relate any two things in the universe together. Our ability to link seemingly unrelated concepts and objects is a significant source of art and humor.
To explore our brain’s ability to relate any two things to each other, let’s play a game of Forced Abstract Relation. The game requires at least two people to play and becomes more fun in larger groups. It begins with one player asking one, or more, other player(s) to relate two random ideas, people or items based on the given category. The other player(s) then respond based on whatever reasons come to mind. If we have more than one player answering, they can debate until the correct conclusion is reached. Let’s look at a few examples.
1. A fork and a spoon – which one is liberal, which one is conservative? Well, the jagged edges of the fork remind us of war, which is associated with conservatism. The soft, round shape of the spoon signifies equality, a foundational principle of liberalism. In addition, forks are used to stab tough food such as meat, which conservatives love to eat, while spoons are used to eat soup, which is quite a mild, agreeable dish. There you have it, spoons are liberal, forks are conservative. Easy, huh?
2. An apple and an orange – which one is angry and which one is kind? This one is a bit tougher. At first glance the apple seems angry because apples are red, the color of rage, and oranges are the softer fruit. The orange, however, is much more acidic than the apple and acid is obviously angry. The apple also reminds us of grandma’s apple pie, which is a very kind treat. Applies are kind, oranges are angry.
The proposed relation can be between any two things in relation to any category. One interesting observation, as we play the game we notice that the number of categories is not as vast as we may have first thought. We even observe that most, if not all of the categories could fall under the master category of male vs. female. Conservative vs. liberal, salt vs. pepper, angry vs. kind, beautiful vs. ugly, waffle vs. pancake, Canadian vs. American – these could all be easily translated into male vs. female. It appears that in every subject that we dichotomize, the divergent characteristics stem from the stereotypical differences between male and female human beings. In any case, it’s a great game because we can exploit our brain’s ability to relate things that should not be relatable in order to find out whether Coke or Pepsi is the male of sodas.
It’s Coke.
Hawkey
The official mascot for the NHL should be a hawk. His name can be Hawkey – Hawkey the hockey hawk.
Rabid
Some contend that the recent rise in popularity of the zombie in television and film reflects our subconscious fear of losing our autonomy. Whether or not this is the case, we take comfort in knowing that the zombie is a fictitious being. We remind ourselves that there is no disease transferred through bite that drives the host insane, but this is a lie.
Zombies are real, and the disease is called rabies.
Fear²
Scaring people is great. There are few things more satisfying than choosing the perfect hiding spot, crouching down and breathing as quietly as possible as you wait for your victim. Your ankle starts to hurt, but you don’t shift your weight because it might make a noise. You feel the need to cough but resist, lest you spoil the ambush. Finally you hear those footsteps and tense up, ready to pounce.
“Rawwwrr!”
Mission accomplished. For a split second the person forgot they lived in a safe, normal world where nothing is trying to kill them. Logical thought processes are temporarily disabled as they react with pure instinct, usually spitting out some stuttered jibberish or swatting at you. It’s these moments of raw behavior that reveal that our grasp on reality is a little looser than we’d like to think. We want to believe that if we saw a monster or an alien, or even a monster-alien hybrid, we would know that it’s a trick and not succumb to irrational fear of something that we all know does not exist. This is not true; what we see and feel is more powerful than what we know.
There are television shows which use hidden cameras to capture these raw moments as unsuspecting pedestrians are subjected to cruel comedic experiments. On one of these shows, a man acting as a zookeeper asks the target if they have seen an escaped gorilla. This all unfolds in broad day light in a busy public park, by the way. Several moments after the zookeeper walks away, a man in a gorilla suit charges the victim and they shriek and flee in terror. But hold on, why would someone believe that an escaped gorilla was wandering around a public park? There are many other scenarios on this show more ridiculous than gorillas in a park, and they all prey on the fact that emotion is more powerful than reason and that perception is greater than knowledge. In the moment when we are confronted with incredible and frightening situations, all that we know about the world evaporates.
Something that is just as awesome, if not more awesome, than scaring a person is allowing the person to scare themselves. If you scare someone enough times, or create situations in which the person expects to be scared, then your objective is completed before you’ve actually done anything. The old saying about the fear of the unknown is accurate, but to truly drive terror into someone’s heart you must also create the second level of fear – the fear of being frightened.
These two forms of fear are known as horror and terror. Horror is the sensation of observing something frightening or repulsive. and terror is the feeling of dread that comes before you see it. As an example, consider a child laying awake at night on his bed, frightened of the monster he believes resides beneath him. His mind is generating images of what might be under the bed, but he doesn’t look. It’s his terror that keeps from peeking below the frame and discovering something that might horrify him – he’s afraid of being scared.
Legendary horror fiction author, Stephen King, praises terror as the finest emotion, and this is what you must use against your victim. Simply ambushing someone and frightening them with a loud noise, while gratifying, fails to generate penetrating, long-lasting fear. You must prey upon your victim’s terror – their fear of being scared – in order to create a haunting fear from which they never truly recover.
Your tactics need not be elaborate. Next time your favorite victim is in the washroom, simply turn the lights off in the living room and go outside; their own fear of being scared will do the rest. Then, a few minutes later, you can tap on the window or pound on the door, then enter and find them shaking in the corner with tears running down their face. Perfect.
Another simple method that works great on guests is closing the shower curtains in your bathroom. They must be opaque curtains, and your shower must be large enough for your victim to fill it with an imaginary murderer. As they relieve themselves they will glance at the curtain and think, “Hmm, there could be a person behind there, maybe even a murderer,” and they’re well on their way to being terrified.
Scaring people makes life more exciting.
First Languages
We all know that everyone has a first language, in terms of communication. We think, write and speak using vocabulary from the language we grew up with. However, this pattern exists beyond the language of oral and written expression and applies to individuals when first contact is made with any system. Whatever system you first encounter, metric or imperial, English or French, piano or guitar, you are eternally cemented in the framework of that system. No matter how intensely you study another system, you must always translate to your first language in your mind.
When someone attempts to learn the metric system, a centimeter is likely described to them as, “approximately half an inch.” Teaching by translation and conversion is slow, tedious and it encourages the mental translation which occurs in the student’s mind. This is not how we learn our first languages, so why do we try to learn new systems in this way? Think about how you first learned the length of an inch. Did someone tell you that it was one twelfth of a foot? Of course not. You learned the length of an inch by looking at something that was an inch long and associating that length with the term inch. This is how we should learn all new systems – observe, then associate.
If someone wants to learn to speak Spanish, they should not merely pick up a Spanish-English dictionary and read it cover to cover. If a person simply wanted to be able to recite Spanish translations of English words, then that dictionary is probably their best bet. Although this tactic may give them a large Spanish vocabulary, their ability to associate those words with objects, feelings or actions would be non-existent. In order to truly comprehend and absorb a new system, you must associate the new terms directly with the world around you.
Translation is the enemy of learning.