As someone who has bought a Blipshift shirt (it was the Dat Asp, if you care) I now get their announcements on a semi-regular basis.
The shirt you see above, which celebrates the designer’s 996 Turbo, is called “Eggolution”. Which drives me absolutely nucking futs, because it’s an example of how meaning gets lost over time.
To understand what “egg” means, let’s return to the 1997 Boxster, which shared pretty much everything forward of the firewall with the 1999-model-year, 996-generation 911:
What you see there is Porsche’s attempt to combine all the lights — main, high, turn, and driving/fog — into a single assembly. The point of this was to
a) get the lights out of the bumpers, to reduce the cost of low-speed crashes;
b) to make the cars cheaper to assemble.
Since this is Porsche, you can assume that b) was the primary reason. Certainly aesthetics weren’t anywhere on the list, since the integrated headlamp assemblies looked terrible from the moment the Boxster was announced. The North American Porsche-owner community, noting the unpleasant combination of turn signal and headlight in the same blob, called the headlamps “fried eggs”. You can see it, right? There’s the “yolk” in there.
Porsche knew they’d screwed up in at least two ways. The first way was in making the 911 and Boxster so obviously identical while charging twice as much for the former. The second was in the sheer ugliness of the headlights. So they tossed in a quick fix:
No more “yolk”. So are these still “fried eggs”? I’d say “no” since they no longer have a yolk. But wait, there’s more. The 911 Turbo debuted the mild facelift that would be applied across the board in 2002:
Now we’ve lost all resemblance to a fried egg. The bottom-heaviness is gone, and so is the “yolk”. What we have is fundamentally the original 911 round light with an extension for the driving light. People still hated it, but they didn’t snicker any more. A few years later, Porsche gave up on the idea entirely and introduced the oval-headlamp 997, with the turn signals back in the bumper:
So why, exactly, is the Blipshift shirt called “Eggolution”? Well, my guess is that it went something like this:
0. The original 996 and Boxster come out. The headlights are called “fried eggs”.
1. Over time on Internet forums, the “fried egg” idea comes to be associated with all 996-platform cars. The same way that idiot SRT-4 owners call the cars “Skittles” even when you’re talking about the black or silver cars for which there’s no equivalent “Skittle” color.
2. This fellow buys an old Turbo (congratulations, by the way; it’s the best of that generation IMO) and hears all sorts of “Fried Egg” comments.
3. So he takes it to heart and makes an “Egg” shirt.
All of this, really, in the space of under ten years. Is it any wonder that the same process, across a much broader human community and a longer span of time, has conspired to make “awesome” mean “good” and “terrible” mean “bad” and “love” mean “like”?
Awesome place settings at this restaurant! The old ones were terrible. Kinda love it!
I know what you’re thinking. What difference does it make? But consider the following:
He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde
In al his lyf unto no maner wight;
He was a verray parfit gentil knyght.
But for to tellen yow of his array,
His hors weren goode, but he was nat gay.
Of fustian he wered a gypoun,
This was written slightly more than five hundred years ago. It’s unreadable now to anybody who hasn’t taken the time to essentially learn a new language; Middle English is about as far from what we speak today as Portugese is from Spanish.
Now here’s my pal Samuel Johnson, from 265 years agp:
When Statutes glean the Refuse of the Sword,
How much more safe the Vassal than the Lord,
Low sculks the Hind beneath the Rage of Pow’r,
And leaves the bonny Traytor in the Tow’r,
Untouch’d his Cottage, and his Slumbers sound,
Tho’ Confiscation’s Vulturs clang around.The needy Traveller, serene and gay,
Walks the wild Heath, and sings his Toil away.
Does Envy seize thee? crush th’ upbraiding Joy,
Encrease his Riches and his Peace destroy,
New Fears in dire Vicissitude invade,
The rustling Brake alarms, and quiv’ring Shade,
This is better, right? But unless you’ve been reading this stuff for a long time, it’s slow going. I doubt that I could find one in fifty Millennials who could explain to me what Johnson means in the first half.
As the delta between current language and the language of the past increases, more and more of the past becomes essentially invisible and inaccessible to us, except through the “translation” of various people who almost always have an axe to grind. Can you imagine a world in which young people simply cannot understand Brave New World or 1984 or Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Moby-Dick? Trust me, we’re on the way.
I find this state of affairs terrifying. It promises to reduce us all to passive consumers of video content. Ignore the race trolling here and just think about the idea:
It’s a hugely symbolic picture. And it promises a future where your content is “curated” into consumerist mush. “Not to worry,” you say, “we can always learn to read the old books.” Not anymore. It’s already illegal to distribute pre-1985 books to children. Think about that for a minute. It’s fucking Orwellian. Of course, you can always have Brave New World republished with lead-free ink. But the publisher might have “concerns” about “problematic” and “racist” sections. What do you do then?
We’ll have true American samizdat. But it won’t matter, because even if you put Kaptial or The Federalist Papers in front of a young person, he’ll be unable to read it anyway.
Last one, from 1929:
But the beasts came on. One by one they emerged from the jungle, until the herd was gathered together again in a compact mass. Then, under the leadership of some big bulls, they advanced. It seemed as if they knew what they were doing, and were determined to revenge themselves by trampling the natives’ huts under their ponderous feet.
But Tom and the others were not idle. Taking a position off to one side, the young inventor began pouring a fusillade of the electric bullets into the mass of slate-colored bodies. Mr. Anderson was also firing, and Ned, who had gotten over some of his excitement, was also doing execution. Mr. Durban, after vainly trying to get his rifle to work, cast it aside. “Here! Let me take your gun!” he cried to Mr. Damon, who, panting from the run, was sitting beneath a tree.
This could pass for modern literature, right? It’s a Tom Swift book. Aimed at eight-year-olds.
Not awesome.
I thought it was simply because the 911 essentially looks like an egg. The Boxster picture didn’t help; always thought it looked the same from both ends. The neunelfer up to and including the 964 less so. 964 über alles, i say.
Can someone explain what’s happening in the picture with the zuck and the vr glasses? Are they all playing farmville, or are they watching porn? Some combination of both?
Pornville, where you are allotted only a few minutes of video per day without doing some menial task and/or opening your wallet. The FUTURE! (TM)
Funny that you mention Moby Dick. I read it on the plane coming back from my trip to LA. Melville was a clever wordsmith. If the book is taught today, the teachers probably focus on the homoerotic subtext of Ishmael and Queequeg’s relationship.
Re: Tom Swift and your recent musings on manhood, do boys today read (or even watch movies) books with any masculine characters that aren’t superheroes? Would Jack London or Hemmingway even show up on a reading list?
I kind of think the “evolution” (as it is) of language is slowing down, what with the world being so interconnected. I mean, languages like English formed over eras where people didn’t move around much and had nearly no communication outside of where they lived. I mean, the British Isles are relatively small but how many languages are still spoken there? Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Scots (both Lowland and Ulster,) Welsh, Cornish, and English. And even among English there can be dialects or accents which are hard for each other to understand at first. try to follow along with someone who has a thick Liverpool (Scouser) accent.
Honestly I think a big part of the simplification English is undergoing is globalization. English is more or less the lingua franca of the business/professional world, and it can be incredibly challenging for non-native speakers to grasp. One of my (informal) tasks at a previous job was helping my Japanese co-workers out when they couldn’t figure out what a particular sentence means. English is admittedly a pretty ugly language, full of “rules” that have lists of exceptions far longer than the rule itself. I don’t think a gradual simplification of the language is a bad thing.
as long as we can keep kids from writing everything in “txt spk” I think that Swift will still be readable by generations to come.
Somewhere I read (“The Brain that Changes Itself” I believe) that classical Western education got a lot right, neurologically speaking. Writing in cursive, learning Latin, heavily emphasizing memorization and mental math, to say nothing of the Renaissance emphasis on art, music, sport … We deride them as old-fashioned and probably racist or something today, but the combination of multiple disciplines in new knowledge bases is exactly the kind of intellectual exercise which develops the ability to, say, understand antiquated English.
It may be simpler yet to point to Kevin D. Williamson’s argument that Americans no longer READ in any meaningful sense.
bullshit.
http://publishers.org/news/us-publishing-industry%E2%80%99s-annual-survey-reveals-28-billion-revenue-2014
Kevin D. Williamson comes off as a grumpy old man who thinks everyone younger than him is an idiot.
Whether you agree with him or not, I think that Kevin Williamson is one of the finest stylists writing these days. Right up there with Jack. The man can turn a phrase.
I don’t know this Williamson fellow, but if were talking about agreeing then I i feel the need.. the need for speed. no wait. I feel the need, the need to point out that people on the internet seem to have lost the ability to recognise that contradictory viewpoints can be equally valid. But then there’s also the problem of presenting two obviously not equal viewpoints as equal.
I have no idea how this relates to screenprinted Porsches on underwear.
I’ll cop to being a Philistine to some degree; I’m pretty deep in the engineering mindset so I tend to fall in the camp of “you want to tell me something, get to the point so I can process it.” Using 300 words to say what can be said in 50 is annoying to me, whether spoken or in print.
(This excludes fiction or similar where the author desires to build an image in the reader’s mind)
I should have known that historical lineup for the Boxster but I hadn’t ever delved into it.
On everything else,… Wow!
I was hoping that communicating via forums, blogs, etc on the internet would revive the written word.
Although my handwriting sure has gone downhill, since I’ve been using a keyboard all the time 🙂
Give that group in the picture an Intravenous tube for food, seat them on an auto-shitter, and hook up a jackoff device and they could stay there for decades…
My name is Mark Zuckerberg, King of Kings!!
An auto-shitter, you say?
Jack it’s not 1/50 millennials; perhaps 1/500.
As noted by Jack, English is constantly changing it’s really the nature of the beast. I don’t think there is anything new about it and I doubt change is accelerating or decelerating (but I’m likely wrong) .
In the end we do have to worry about preserving our past with little to no editing. I know I give my son a lot of my old Hardy Boys (and a few Tom Swifts) some of which are 1st and 2nd printings. My parents were big readers and as such have given my kids many books, many from their personal (very large) library meaning many of the books are over 40 years old.
For man stories my 9 year old is reading Hatchet by Gary Paulson right now, While a fairly modern book it is also a very gritty survival story for the target age (my son is 9) He is loving it. I may give him some of my Farley Mowat and Jack London novels next.
English language is winning around the world. I am amazed by how many perfectly good words in my native language are being replaced by their English counterparts….because globalization…it says “printer” on the box so that’s what we’ll now call it.
English is the official language of worldwide air traffic control — I rejoice in the fact that Moscow, Tehran and Pyongyang have to direct international flights in English!
Change being the only constant in the universe and all that, I don’t think we can say it’s necessarily a bad thing that the language has changed and continues to change. That said, I think there’s something to what Jack is talking about in terms of the dumbing down of society, “newspeak”, and etc. This article has some interesting perspectives in that regard: http://www.spinninglobe.net/spinninglobe_html/lessons.htm
Pay particular attention to the sections discussing literacy rates, which, as you will see, show a problem extending back far further than the current crop of Millenials.
On a more serious note: Speaking of Porsche, should I buy a 996 Turbo, a 911SC, or a Carrera 3.2?
“On a more serious note: Speaking of Porsche, should I buy a 996 Turbo, a 911SC, or a Carrera 3.2?”
Oh boy.
The 996TT is the most car for the money and I can’t recommend against one. I’d like to have one myself. Prices WILL go up.
The 911SC is probably the best “value” of aircooled cars right now, although I’d really blanch at paying more than $20k.
The 3.2 Carrera is either overvalued or undervalued depending on what you think will happen to aircooled prices. But they made a LOT of them compared to 993s and 964s.
Thanks! I’ve been leaning towards the 996TT for about a year now, especially since air-cooled prices started going up. I really like the idea of owning an air-cooled car, but, knowing what they were selling for even two years ago, it’s kind of hard to justify.
If I had room for another Porker it would be a 996 or 997TT.
Damn Jack ;
This is deep .
I hope more get the bigger importance of this article .
-Nate
Good stuff.
I could decipher the first half, but then I am nowhere near a Millenial, except for my son, who has not yet flown the coop (though it looks imminent). But that’s another story.
Been incommunicado recently for a variety of reasons, most mundane compared to your orthopedic and other adventures…a sprained ankle, a round of flu in the whole household, etc.
But as to the comparison of Middle English to modern English being akin to Portuguese to one who speaks Spanish, I would disagree. I have over the years educated myself to the level of at least a college graduate of a Spanish language university, but have just decided to try to tackle Portuguese.
And I find deciphering Portuguese to be an order of magnitude easier than decoding Middle English is, even with a considerably above average (tested) grasp of English.
In Portuguese, the main difference is in spelling and pronunciation alone, but with words that sound much alike and mean much the same. Hardly so for many words in vogue at Shakespeare’s or Johnson’s time.
Likewise, Golden Age Spanish is much easier to fathom compared to modern Spanish, then Middle English is to modern English. The primary differences with 400 year old Spanish (El Cid, Don Quijote), read in the original, are spelling, with only a few words with different usage and meaning.
Perhaps it is my lack of study of the evolution of English, but there is no way I could have a similar experience with approximately 400 year old English. YMMV.