10 things

[trochee]

I got "tagged" by this meme from writeanya some time back. 10 things you might not know about me.

1. I never dated until college.
2. I had terrible fear of speaking in public until I was about 15, when I blossomed. I wound up delivering the serious valedictorian speech.
3. I have a secret fanboy desire to learn to scratch records.
4. As a pedestrian, I treat running cars -- all of them -- like a threat. This is occasionally annoying to the people who are pedestrianing with me.
5. My parents got a call from the school once in fifth grade because I wrote a story that sounded like I was thinking about hurting people or myself. (It was alienated SF, about someone picking up his little blue spinny marble, wiping off the damp green goo, and going home.)
6. I have never broken a bone.
7. I've shaken hands with Fidel Castro.
8. I was deaf for several months in my very early childhood.
9. I used to confuse George Orwell and Orson Welles. I mean, get them mixed up.
10. My middle name is my mother's maiden name, and my last name is my father's last name. My brother's middle name and last name are the same as mine, only swapped. We went to the same university, but because of this unusual arrangement, it was not obvious from our names that we are siblings. (Somebody once found us chatting at a party, and asked "oh, so you guys know each other?" "Yes," replied _dkg_, "we went to the same high school." I choked on my drink laughing.)

I'm killing the exponential growth of it by not tagging anybody, but if you like it, please consider yourself tagged.

Comments

[lunacow]

Um? I have looked up the maxim, and I still don't know what you mean.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

erm, the positive Gricean maxims amount to "be as informative as possible" [the negative ones: "... and no more so"] -- by making a statement that was substantially weaker than possible (e.g., _dkg_ could have said "we're brothers") he's not being as informative as possible.

[Nerd alert] the humor comes from the listener's Gricean inference that our shared high school is our closest connection. The humor would still be there had he made any other statement that was weaker than the (presumably) strongest possible:

"we went to the same elementary school", "we had a bunch of friends in common", "we're both from Atlanta", or even "we share a mother" -- the Gricean inference there would be that we're half-brothers, though we're full brothers.

[lunacow]

Oh oh oh! I was absolutely convinced for some reason that you were saying my comment ("I love the story about you and DKG!") was a violation of the Gricean maxim, rather than what happened in the story itself. Duh. Okay, makes perfect sense now.