GUYS I JUST REALIZED THE ME AN INTELLECTUAL MEME IS A PERMUTATION OF OLD NORSE KENNINGS HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
explain
(I wrote a paper on it but it’s 11pm here so give me a break if I get something wrong neither english nor any scandinavian language is my native one)
kenning & heiti is substituting a word with another (heiti) or several (kenning, pl. kenningar thank you very much). (definitions here vary tho, consult an actual expert)
so for example, instead of “ship” you say “wave-steed”, “conqueror of the sea”, “Njord’s favoured”
a bottle might be “bearer of water” or "giver of life"
this went to extreme lengths like “falcon’s seat” for head because a bird sits at the highest point and also a falcon is a pretty noble bird. this is actually one of the tamer examples. the skalds were wild nerds.
i know what kennings are, but i want to know the connection with the meme
which is based on mocking hypercorrection, and replacing typically colloquial phrases with humorously incorrect pretentious ones
i mean theoretically you could make a kenning version of this meme like
you: the ocean me, an intellectual: the whale-road
but you would lose the pretentiousness because this is just a beautiful metaphor, not something pseudo-intellectuals would say
(and don’t worry your english is good)
Hold my seat fam imma try to talk more abt it when i get outta old norse study group
OK SO SO SO
@terpsikeraunos
You’re right, I spoke loosely and prematurely in saying that the intellectual meme is a kenning
Their superficial similarity is one of form: “x” becomes “outlandish/antiquated quasi-retro-permutation of x”
But kennings and memes in general do stem from the same place in that they signify a story in a concise and distilled packet of media that is not necessarily understandable at an initial viewing of someone uninitiated into the particular story-culture that surrounds them
you could call a kenning a meme, or vice-versa, with decent accuracy, but you’re right, both stem from a place of wildly different motive (poetic cognizance vs situational mockery in this case), so it would be more accurate to say that both share a fundamentally similar MO
AND THEN we have the point of apparent difference in the role of absurdity in memes. right now, x percent of people reblogging the “bode” meme are doing so because they understand the full circumstances of its origin and are sharing it as an “inside joke” meme; at the same time, y percent are reblogging because of its detached and amusing absurdity. You could argue that kennings differ fundamentally from this because of the greater emphasis placed on understanding of the stories that the discrete word-combinations signify. However, the process of enjoying a meme in a vacuum – relishing the absurdity of a “detached meme”– is in its own right a parallel to our appreciation of kennings whose definitive meanings have ultimately been lost to the world. We appreciate detached memes for the acontextual absurdity that implies an inside joke; we appreciate lost kennings for the acontextual beauty that implies an unknown history. Absurdity is to memes as beauty is to kennings, and both function on known and unknown significance.
all in all, both memes and kennings are a cultural shibboleth, or rite of initiation, one way or another and i just really like that way of thinking of them
thanks for the clarification! so if this is about absurdity or non sequitur then kennings would not be like this meme to their original audience any more than contemporary lyric conventions are to us, but it could be similar to the meme now wrt how we might now receive kennings out of context
which is to say i need to make a non sequitur old english meme now
@the-everythingsquirrel
@inkvellir You: meme Me, an intellectual: joy of sneks/ image of the word screen/ liquid of the thought coffer of the nerd
