alternative hippopotamus

progressive cyberdadaism from our nation’s capital

June 25, 2007

Now That’s Ecclectic

by @ 3:39 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Allow me to pick on Politico for a moment. While I found this article on groups who lobby for bicycle commuting to be interesting, this paragraph didn’t sound right to my ears:

About 57 million Americans ride bikes, according to a 2002 survey sponsored by the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The bicycling community is an eclectic collection of schoolchildren, bike messengers and everything in between. Many of these riders have their own organizations.

“[A]n eclectic collection of schoolchildren, bike messengers and everything in between.”

Okay, I give up. What’s between a school child and a bike messenger? What’s outside of those two extremes? I’m just saying that while I can see how you can have an eclectic collection of people of all nationalities, or an ecclective collection of musicians, I don’t think you can have an eclectic collection of everything between an apple and an orange.

I’m picking on the use of the word “between.” But there’s a bigger problem. One reason that people don’t bike to work is that other people like themeselves don’t bike to work. People are uncomfortable with doing things that are even a little outside of the orthodoxy. And, for good reason. Society tends to punish those who act in a way that’s outside of convention.

Let me give a real example from my college days. The summer before I started college we got a letter describing things we should bring with us for the fall. One item on the list was a backpack. I got by very well with cheap briefcases. But everyone else was going to be wearing backpacks, so I thought well, I’ll give it a shot.

Here’s what happened. I was wearing my backpack to campus one day when some people I knew from the dorm saw me and started to laugh. I asked them what was so funny. They told me that what was funny was that I was wearing my backpack the same way that a hiker would wear it with a strap over each shoulder. But people on the campus all wore their backpacks just over one shoulder. So they thought I looked pretty funny.

That’s how closely the idea of convention is defined. Wearing a backpack over both shoulders invites ridicule.

Soon after this incident, I put my backpack in the closet and went back to cheap briefcases.

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hip·po·pot·a·mus n. A notion, perhaps distinct from conventional wisdom, that needs to be verified by reality-based scrutiny.

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95. Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum (I think that I think, therefore I think that I am.)
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

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