Flailing about words.

[lenora_rose]

The silly one:

I was asking myself, Self, is the word ouroboros too culturally laden or specific to use in a setting that isn't this world?

This of a story where the "local" language is pretty blatantly based on French and the nearest foreign one on Swedish (and these facts are not, as it happens, exclusively laziness. There's still only one world in my worldbuilding where humans *evolved*...).

But it still seems a pretty specific concept to include.

__________________

The frustrating one:

I really shouldn't get into debates with people in person.

I am not a facts at her fingertips type girl. I'll have read three or four articles on a subject, including a dissenting opinion to check my own assumptions, and skimmed some others for tidbits that weren't in the first ones. Or I'll have taken a course at some point where it came up. I'll have seen charts, and graphs, and analyses and critiques thereof. I can surprise people with knowing a weird bit of trivia, and thereby convince at least some of them that I might know what I'm talking about.

Until i get into an off the cuff debate. Then it always feels like I often can't remember a single one of them extemporaneously. Not one damn telling point. When i do, i remember half of one so it sounds like nonsense. I'll feel like I'm standing there waving my arms crying "There are facts! They exist! They're out there .... somewhere. Dammit!" Which is... unconvincing.

I should also remember about identifying when something is a point of faith for the person I'm debating with (or for myself) and know to leave it alone, because then the facts are in service to something not factual at all.

Just... argh.

(If anyone's wondering, the topic was climate change.)

Comments

[mildred_of_midgard]

I have similar problems where I have an extensive passive knowledge, but lack a thorough active command of a subject.

But where it hits me the most is when I sit down to write something formal and try to cite my sources for all this unquestioned knowledge I've been carrying around in my head for years. "I swear my prof said this once in class!" "A friend who studied biology told me that..." "I read and skimmed hundreds of books and articles while researching my dissertation, and I remember this one sentence, and I don't know where I read it!!!"

I never understood how anyone, after they researched a topic for two years and sat down to write, could either reliably remember or have systematically recorded everything they decided they needed to cite. I never had any idea when I read something what would come in useful later, and if I annotated *everything*, I wouldn't get past the first book. I just read stuff and informed myself on the subject, and then I ended up in citations hell a year later.

I never did figure out how people do that...

[lenora_rose]

Citations can indeed be hell. I'm pretty good at remembering the book, the area of a book, and the part of a page I read a specific passage on, so if I have the book or have it out from the library then I'm usually fine. But I also bookmarked like heck with dozens of teeny little bits of paper any time I was reading with an essay in mind, so I wouldn't have to stop to do anything more strenuous like write down what may be useful. And teeny bits of paper move/get lost so easily.

And doing that when it's something I read long before the essay was planned? (As you say, the generalized knowledge one carries, and two years worth of accumulated notes). Nightmare.

And of course, for topics online, none of that visual memory ("It was about 2/3 in and on the top left") helps remotely with online sources, and I don't bookmark pages for every interesting tidbit.