For my 3D production class I had to create a three shot short that was a remake of an existing movie scene- with muppets. I ran out of time to do the particle water effects, but this is basically Pacific Rim anyway.
We’re losing our collective shit laughing at this. Holy crap it’s so funny, please turn the sound on.
“Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the ’70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyper-consumerist, hyper-individualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.”
Meanwhile, “utter” works for the first (e.g., “you utter floorboard”) but somehow “utterly” doesn’t seem to work as well for the second (“I was utterly floorboarded”).
Utterly doesn’t work for drunk because it’s the affix for turning random objects into terms for *shocked*, obviously.
… huh. I thought that might just be the similarity to “floored”, and yet “I was utterly coat hangered” does seem to convey something similar.
I have to tell you, I am utterly sandwiched at this discovery.
Completely makes the phrase mean “super tired”.
“God, it’s been a long week, I am completely coat-hangered.”
Something is
Something is wrong with our language
Is it a glitch or a feature?
Feature
this neat feature is called collocative substitution, and it occurs when certain words are strongly linked to certain context and/or phrases. when you read/hear a pair of words that usually wouldn’t go together, your brain fills in the context with what would normally be inferred, given the originally phrased pairing. thus, finding out that there’s a term for this phenomenon may indeed leave you utterly sandwiched. lesser known or less strongly linked phrases and pairings may not be able to translate substituted words to appropriately fit the inferred context, so you were not utterly floorboarded at the club last night, but rather you were absolutely floorboarded, and as this explanation continues to drag on, you may by the end of it find yourself completely coathangered from read it all.
I, like all linguists I have met or even heard of, have a deep intricate love-hate relationship with the English Language because of complete and total coathangering like this
My dad told me a story recently about how he was in Boy Scouts or something and they went on a hike and were each given a rifle and one single bullet to practice shooting with (idk, it was the 70s or whatever). One of his friends, whom I’ll refer to as Steel Balls for reasons that will soon become clear, beckons my dad to a part of the woods and points to a giant hornets nest up in a tree. SB announces that he’s going to shoot it, waits for my dad to take cover (as one should in this situation), and fires off his only round into the nest. Sure enough, a swarm of pissed off hornets descend upon SB, who stands stoically and perfectly still at the base of the tree. Dad maintains that, despite their buzzing right around him, none of the hornets stung his friend, and they soon calmed down and returned to their newly renovated nest. SB turns back to face my dad and imparts this chunk of wisdom: “That’s the secret to dealing with hornets, Jim. They don’t know humans make rifle shots; they don’t know where the noise came from. You gotta stand still and don’t move, and they won’t chase you. If you run, they know you’re guilty.” Apparently dad was so awed he gave up his single bullet so SB could shoot the nest a second time, with the same results.
Long story short: hornets can sense guilt and there are people in the world who have tested this theory.
