Meme Dictionary Future Proposal?

 Hello everyone. I have been kept busy with the Snacking Otaku (and other reasons), hence the lack of posts this year. I have not abandoned this blog. It’s just I had to prioritise other things.

The reason for writing this post is this.

Back in 2018 I had the idea of making a dictionary of memes. Soon afterward I bought an external hard drive and began collecting research material. It has been neglected a bit, but I was expecting this project to be a dip-in dip-out thing anyway. Originally, I planned to make it a book, but recently I had a thought. Maybe I should publish this dictionary as a blog, in the similar style to the Snacking Otaku. As of now, no entry is complete let, so don’t expect anything any time soon. In fact, I was thinking of making it an online depository for notes. But this incompleteness gave me another idea. What if I made two versions of the dictionary? A “fixed” official one (written by me) and a wiki version people can contribute. And if someone adds something interesting it gets added to the official one.

This is all for off into the future … if you want me to do so. That is why I’m posting this. I want your opinions on this project.

But I want to address something about this project. This project explores ALL ASPECTS of culture. Not just the obvious stuff, like music, literature and paintings. I’m exploring everything – architecture, fashion, graffiti, linguistics, gardening, product design, baking, knitting, sport, pornography etc.

That last example touches something I need to address about this project. It will involve subjects that are taboo. The kind of things most people are embarrassed or ashamed to acknowledge happens in their culture. But you can’t have a full picture of a culture without exploring these subjects. Its like writing about 18^th century Europe and only talking about royalty and aristocrats. It’s a nice cultured story, but it leaves out a lot of information to build context, such as how dependent they were on servants or how some made their fortunes through African slaves.

Talking about taboos is tricky. Not only because of their artificially-created nature, but also the fact that taboos are not a fixed constant through space and time. This is something many “lazy thinkers” don’t seem to know or realise. A society’s moral compass can change and is shaped by the unique history of a tribe. In other words, what can be seen as “fine” in one culture can be a taboo in another and vice versa. For example, how much skin exposure is okay on a female. Today (ignoring COVID for a moment) the sight of a woman in a bikini almost won’t shock anyone on Miami. In Dubai, however, she’ll be likely to be arrested for indecency. However, back in 1920, the woman in Miami will also be arrested for the same reason.

Let me put what I’m saying another way. What you think is “taboo” or “offensive” is not the same everywhere and everywhen. You can’t judge the past with the present day’s moral compass. The fact that they were people who made fortunes on trading slaves in the past should be an indicator of this fact. 

In fact, what is considered “offensive” can vary from person to person. For these reasons, when I considered making this dictionary a printed book, I thought it should come with a free black marker pen so people can censor their own individual copies. It’ll cost a fortune to make different edited editions for various territories.

If this dictionary does go online, I have to print this disclaimer at the top.

This dictionary will contain things that are not suitable for children and things some will find “offensive.” This dictionary is committed to explore all aspects of culture to build a complete picture of the world. None of this dictionary’s example content originates from the main author, so if you do find something here offensive, blame the thing’s original creator for having such bad taste to begin with, not the creator of this dictionary, who just put it there as an example form history.

Of course, the actual number of “offensive” things would probably only make up, at most, 1% of the content of the final dictionary. Although a lot happened in the 20^th century, that only covers a tiny fraction of all of human history, even if you exclude the Stone Age. So, that disclaimer is just a precaution … like a face mask. There’s always going to be that 0.1% that’ll genuinely find it sick … while an extra 1% find it a cause worth making a fuss about – even if it doesn’t affect them at all.

What do you think?

Should I peruse the online idea?

Meme Dictionary Update

I have published on a separate page a list of (almost) all the subjects my meme dictionary will cover.

You can access it by clicking here.

By the way - like the banner?

Making Dictionaries

Have you ever tried to explain what something is to someone who has never seen or heard of that thing before? 

Say something you experienced while on a trip to somewhere “foreign.” Or something you use everyday to someone from another culture. Or an abstract concept to a student or disciple. Or maybe what a new craze or fashion is in your culture? 

Have you ever, during such explanations, used other things to compare it with? Have you ever, while explaining one thing, ended up explaining what another thing is because they didn’t know what the thing you comparing it with is? Have you ever had trouble explaining things because you used words or terms that the listener has never heard before?

Now, keep all this in your mind and get out a dictionary. 

Flick through it and read a random definition in it… and another…. and another…..

You may now have an idea why making a dictionary is no easy task … and one that can take years to complete. 

It took Samuel Johnson seven years to make A Dictionary of the English Language in the 18^th century. This is considered an amazing feat for an individual, if you consider how long it took some dictionaries to be made with the help of a team. The Brothers Grimm started work on Deutsches Wörterbuch (“The German Dictionary”) in 1838. It wasn’t complete until 1961 (well, a few revolutions, two world wars and the division of Germany during the Cold War did hold them up a bit (the team who worked on it after the Grimms died)).

Of course, Johnson and the Grimms were doing dictionaries for whole entire languages, making their efforts more tasking. But I bet even dictionaries that have limited what they could list (dictionaries on certain fields, like medicine, for instance) are as tricky to write as those epic productions of lexicography. 

Back in January I did a post proposing an interesting idea - a dictionary. "The Cultural Vandal's Dictionary of Visual Culture" it was originally called. Based in an old book I discovered it was a dictionary that contained images of how various things have been used in media. In other words, a dictionary of memes and how they are used in culture.

Back then, it was just an idea. 

Now, its a project that's going to (probably) take decades to do (on and off, while doing everything else). I've already bought an external hard drive dedicated to collecting images (and other things) illustrating entries and (just recently) I (sort of) finished writing a list of entries and their basic definitions.... which is the main subject of this post.

I want this book (it would be great idea to make it into a real book, like a real dictionary you'll find in a library) to be like an actual dictionary. A two or three column page layout throughout. But how I do the entries is a bit different. Each entry will begin with a small simplified picture of the subject (a picture so simple that (I hope) if embossed a blind person could make out what it is). Then you'll get its name (in English, the most learned second language on Earth) and a simple definition, before finally getting the text explaining it and examples of it.

Here's a random example of definitions I've written (as they are now. They may change in the future).....

Abacus A counting aid made from a ladder with beads threaded through its steps.

Circle A flat shape which results when you curve a straight line until the ends connect.

Flasher A person (usually a male) who exposes their uncovered body parts (especially those subject to taboo) in public.

Piano A machine designed to play music by a mechanism where pressed keys make hammers hit strings inside it. 

Salamander A wet-skinned lizard-like animal.

Spoon A tool made of a stick with a bowl attached at one end used to stir, dig into, or pick up food while eating or preparing food.

Trojan Horse A means to move a means of attack into a target without the target knowing it is an attack.

Wedding A ceremony where two people officially become a couple under a culture’s rules governing people pairings.

To write these I developed some rules.

• They have to be short (As much as possible, just one sentence). 
• I have to use a simple limited vocabulary. (try to use only words that are also found in the dictionary)

The "simple limited vocabulary" rule was inspired Randall Monroe's Thing Explainer. In it, all the text is written only using the "ten hundred" most-commonly used words in the English language. (the word "thousand" wasn't one of the "ten hundred.")

Admittedly, I did use a dictionary to aid me (and I haven't run them through Munroe's Simple Writer to check if they are as simple as they can be …. let). But, its a good starting point for this project. 

According to Microsoft Word's paragraph count feature, I have listed exactly 1,350 entries for my dictionary. So, this dictionary is going to be pretty big. (The book that inspired this project only had 1,200 entries)

The original dictionary that inspired this project was limited to memes used in visual media (it was a book made for graphic designers). My dictionary is going to expand to all forms of culture - music, poetry, cuisine, fashion, interior design, architecture, cave art, even language itself (One recent purchase was Written in Stone by Christopher Stevens, a book about the original Indo-European language and how its words led to the creation of the many words we use today).
One last thing, this is the final title for it - "The Cultural Vandal’s Dictionary of Memes, Metaphors, Tropes, Clichés, and the Occasional Stereotype."

A Possible Future Project

Pictured here is a gem in my book collection.

The Dictionary of Visual Language (1980)

I first found out about this book from Jason Godfrey's Bibliographic: 100 Classic Graphic Design Books (The title is self-explanatory). As soon as I found out about it I searched Amazon and found it .... and placed it in my Wish List .... and (eventually) bought a copy. (I'm not an impulsive buyer.)

The Dictionary of Visual Language began life in 1975 as one of the "Pentagram Papers" (a series of promotional booklets made by the famous design firm). Even though the authors (Philip Thompson and Peter Davenport) took a year to make it, this prototype (entitled ABC of Graphic Clichés) only covered A, B and C. It took a couple of years to cover the rest of the alphabet. 

You could call this a dictionary of our visual culture. A catalogue of memes, even. From abacus to zebras, this book explains and shows how and why various things have been used in various graphic designs, from the 19th century to the 1970s (the book was published in 1980).

This book intrigues me because it kind of taps into something I did back when I was a child. Back then I had a small obsession with dictionaries with illustrations in them. It may have started with a DK CD-ROM. It was the app of the moment for me on my Dad's PC and it inspired me to do something. For about a few years I was drawing the alphabet. On the first sheet of paper I drew everything I could think of that started with "A". Then on the next sheet I did everything I an think of that began with the letter "B". And I go on until I reached "Z". I can't remember how many times I did this as a child. But one thing do remember is that the number of stuff I drew increased overtime, as I learnt about more stuff. It was an intellectual challenge that added to the 10,000 hours of drawing practice I had before high school.

Since then this may have developed into a fascination in cataloguing the world. I know they are people who do just that with nature (real and fictional). But my fascination in human ingenuity has made it focused on manmade things (artworks, buildings, manufactured objects and so on). But I'm also a visually-minded culture explorer (as evident with my comic and movie collection). So what if I combined these two obsessions into one single project?

What if I made my own "Cultural Vandal's Dictionary of Visual Culture"? The Dictionary of Visual Language was made as an art book for graphic designers, which is why its contents were mostly ads, magazine covers, and logos. It was made at a time when the profession was becoming more sophisticated and professional, especially after the "creative revolution" in advertising in the 1960s. (The writer of the foreword, George Lois, was a part of this revolution.).

But my version will cover all visual culture - cave art, tapestries, frescos, movies, video games, internet memes and so on. What many don't realise is that the same meme can have the same cultural values across every medium. No matter what medium, an image of a dove in it can represent peace. 

Its just an idea I just had. Do you think its worth perusing?