The SL/SL Forum Dictionary

Second Life is unique in its own right, full of creative individuals. It should be only natural then that we have come up with our own special way of describing the events around us. I'd like to start compiling a dictionary of common words. This doesn't have to follow any sort of format, and you can put whatver uniqueisms you run across here.

I for one, have nothing but questions to contribute for the opening post, and maybe others can come behind and add insight as we go along.

So, please define for me:

Memes:
Contextual quote:


SA:
Contextual quote:


I apologize for these being ... rather colourful ... but sometimes I look at a post and just have to ask ... "Shadenwawa????"

(And no, it was honestly just an coincidence that Michi happened to get both quotes at the start)

I'll take a stab.

A meme is somewhat of a socially viral theme or idea which gets passed around, typically through forums, blogs, whatever, until just about everyone is linking to or talking about it. For some reason I hate saying the word and will avoid using it whever possible, unless it has some sexy French pronunciation which I don't yet know about.

SA might be the Something Awful forums/group. Someone else will have to give you some history behind this, or look it up on wikipedia.

A meme is a story that gets repeated over and over, often changing as time progresses. SA refers to the site somethingawful.com. A group of their members are active in SL, and some of them are very anti-Furry.

Then there's Seth Kanahoe's Sentences, a series of wise and foolish sayings relating to Second Life, the 493rd of which is this:

"Memes, heh. Anyone who uses memes to try to explain anything is a loser who usually spells the word loser as looser."

Or the 779th sentence, which is this:

"When I first heard the term SA in Second Life, I thought they were talking about something awful, like the Sturmabteilung. Then I realized they were. Then I realized that I had just violated Godwin's Law, and that was something awful."

OMG!

There exists another person in the world who also thinks "memes" are a crock? I am so tired of "passing" in SL by pretending this is a valid idea.

Yay!

"meme" is abused like "nanotechnology" or "singularity" is... haha...

I usually head to Wikipedia or Urban Dictionary to check up on some terms that standard English dictionaries aren't up to snuff with, and I'm especially interested in things that originated in SL.

memes: meh.

"Meme" is not an SL term. "Meme" was used in a book by Richard Dawkins in 1976 and people seemed to think it was some kind of big discovery, though the idea being expressed was not necessarily particularly new.

"The notion of a unit of social evolution and the term in a slightly different transliteration of the Greek word, was introduced in 1904 by a German evolutionary biologist Richard Semon in his work Die Mnemische Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalenempfindungen translated in English in 1921 as The Mneme." - wikipedia

SA stands for Something Awful, there is a website somethingawful.com. You can search the forums for furries and goons and find out some of the history of the SA in SL.

There is a glossary in the secondlife.com/help wiki, at SL Glossary, this glossary might be in need of updating if anyone has some time to spend.

Might try the SL History Wiki too, for SL background info,

Heuvadoches, if you get enough terms, I would gladly publish a SL dictionary.

An entire inworld dictionary was put together in the first year by Kathy Yamamoto I believe. Ought to ask if we can add that to the glossary.

Historical precedent:

http://secondlife.com/notes/2003_10_20_archive.php

and a more recent article:

http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/2005/02/glossing_it_ove.html

Published in PDF format?

Hi Taggy

Memes don't exist.

Tell all your friends.

The forums are set by default to only display the more recent posts. Older posts are available in the archives. There is a link to the archives at the bottom right of the screen.
The archives don't seem to be complete but they are all the official records we have access to. I know they deleted the entire scripting forum at one point so that part is missing. The archives aren't broken up into different forums.

They still wouldn't exist, even then. They're a fashionable "literary" convention, much like Social Darwinism and phrenology - describing complex interactions simplistically.

I would have used "Bushisms" and "Intelligent Design" but ... I didn't feel like stupidifying (oops! Bushism...) the thread.



SA: Something Awful. Yes, I've heard of that place. *shakes head gently* Definately NSFW. I just want to know why you imply that furries are the source of such troll fodder. I would have blamed the fools who are here only to disrupt more than those who are here to contribute to the community as a whole. Linking a contributing group to a disruptive group only feeds the problem of prejudicial inequalities.

I don't imply that furries are the source of a problem. One of the actions attributed to SA members in SL is to plague and torment the furries. Thus using furry and goon as search terms in the forums search engine might yield some results. You can't search directly for SA because our stupid search engine won't search for three letter terms, much less two letter terms. Goons might be a good search term also. When doing forum searches I think unfortunately that the archives have to searched separately - no way to do a global search of the whole thing.