On Blepittiy
Published: 2022/09/02
Word Count: 573
The Murderbot discord made up a joke literary term and I had a lot of feelings about literary analysis and jargon and building community
It started as a joke term - sure, we can make up our own literary terms, “blepittiy” - with a definition randomly plucked from the air - the likelihood of the robots in a piece of media to rebel - but the thing with jokes is you can use them as a joke but also simultaneously play them straight, you can use them as a vehicle for deeper analysis because the risks are lower. It’s just a meme so you can indulge in it a bit more because who cares, this isn’t serious analysis. Not putting concepts on a pedestal - giving a concept an inherently silly name - makes it easier for everyone to contribute. It lowers the barrier to entry.
Like PowerPoint parties. The baseline assumption is that everyone has a niche topic they can and will rant about for at least five minutes nonstop. No concept too specific, no rant too petty. Do the PowerPoints need to be pretty or polished? No! Do you need to be enthusiastic and believe that you have something worth saying? Yes! And everyone else believes it along with you.
And not all terms created this way will stick. There needs to be a … linguistic hole being filled, an incomplete conversation that can be completed with this word. If there weren’t a hole, it wouldn’t have been filled so readily with content. Robots rebelling is a common enough phenomenon in media that there are jokes about it (It has been 0 days since the last discussion of a robot revolution. Great job, everyone!), but until now there wasn’t a single word to describe or analyze it.
And the word itself doesn’t matter but the fact that it is a word does? Because then it’s not nonsense, then it’s jargon, and jargon gets a lot of (often valid) vitriol (trust me, I get it, I worked in consulting for five years), but it’s there for a purpose. If you want to talk about “a short period of time wherein a project team works to complete specific tasks or milestones, breaking the overall project schedule into digestible blocks of time with smaller goals,” yeah you could say “a short period of time wherein a project team works to complete specific tasks or milestones, breaking the overall project schedule into digestible blocks of time with smaller goals” every time … or you could just say “sprint.” It’s shorthand, it’s efficient, it makes communication about the concept much easier. It often enables communication about the topic in the first place! The term “sprint” spawns the term “sprint retrospective,” which is two layers of jargon deep. The content follows the form.
Would the Sonic blepittiy meta exist today if the term blepittiy didn’t? The creation of the term spawned the content (not to say the thoughts weren’t already there re: Sonic and its robots! But maybe not with this lens of analysis, and certainly not in conversation with the other blepittiy posts being written at the same time).
There are considerations in jargon use, though. Newcomers to your community/company/conversation won’t know the jargon and history, and will need it explained to them. It’s easy to be an asshole about it. Much harder - but worthwhile - to create an environment where newbies are brought in to the in-group in a way that makes them feel like they’re part of the joke, instead of “you had to be there I guess,” outsiders who arrived too late.