range

Says You is a public radio program that includes bluffing rounds, where one team is assigned an obscure word, two of its members create fake definitions for it, and the other team tries to guess the actual definition. Yesterday, the word for one of the rounds was filk.

I thought, "Oh, geez, that's a gimme!"

The guessing panel picked one of the fake definitions.

The studio audience was in favor of the other fake definition.

In tandem with my partner discovering Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog only just last week, it's a well-timed reminder that my perceptions of "popular" and "well-known" are somewhat skewed.

(This is related to why I generally discourage academic authors from using the adjective "well-known" and "famous" in their prose: if something is truly is well-known, saying so is redundant, and if it's knowledge that wasn't previously shared by the reader, it can unnecessarily distance or alienate them.)

(Tangent: the only other word I've recognized going into a bluffing round was "hardanger." That one, not so much of a double-take.)

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I haven't gotten around to reading Alma Alexander's books yet, but I peeked at her Flycon posts from this past weekend, and this one really struck a chord with me:

...whoever said that you or ANYBODY else are going to be reading the same book, ever, even when every word in it is identical between your two copies?

...It is flat impossible to write for every possible interpretation of a given set of words – you would have to have the mind and the breadth of vision of a God to be able to understand everything about everybody, to know the contents of every single person's duffle bag as they slog along the road of life. You write a story -- and after it's out of your hands it's between the story and the readers. They may have issues with the story. While "issues" are often something that you can take on board and fix in your head and do better (or try to) in your next story -- it's also true that you could not posssibly have known about every issue from every reader. You owe the reader the best story that you could write. What they discover in it… is more often than not something that you never thought that you had said. As a writer, this is something that you have to live with.