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But whether or not the point is exclusion, I don't think you can deny that inside jokes foster a feeling of isolation for those not in the know.
by mieubrisse 14y ago
But whether or not the point is exclusion, I don't think you can deny that inside jokes foster a feeling of isolation for those not in the know.
- lubujackson 14y agoEspecially when you post it to your very public blog. Who is this post meant for?
- georgeorwell 14y agoIt's meant for everyone, from the cool people who got it right away at the A table where Paul and Harj sit (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5371321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5371321 ), right on down to the D table where people like me and you sit. You can't have popular without unpopular. When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called "retards." We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was, including us. http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html ... and the people at the E table are the hellbanned ones like losethos / SparrowOS, who incidentally might just get up and leave if someone at the A table told them nobody was allowed to talk to them.