It’s not often that a date that starts with margaritas strays into Googling the phrase “Nazis end argument,” but hey, it’s not that often that a date includes a blue Cosby sweater and Algerian conspiracy theories, either, so I’ve learned to just go with the flow…anyway, full of nachos and mischief, Jiang and I find ourselves unable to remember the name of the principle which states that any mention of fascism or the Nazis automatically ends the argument, as well as loses the argument for the mentioner. And it’s driving us nuts, so clearly we have to grab a six of Corona and book it up the stairs to his place to look it up.

And it’s Godwin’s Law — but Godwin’s Law actually states that “[a]s an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” In other words, the longer the discussion, the greater the likelihood that Hitler is going to come up. It has a number of corollaries, but none of them really has to do with what Jiang and I had in mind, namely that any citation of fascism, the Nazis, Hitler, et al. necessarily ends the discussion, partly because nothing comparable to those things exists, which makes it difficult to continue the dialogue — but primarily because such a mention is designed not to continue the dialogue. Once you’ve ramped the rhetoric up to Nazi levels, you’ve got no place else to go; you’ve already gone to eleven, it’s over. It’s why people do it, because there isn’t any response to it — but I still feel that that’s an admission of defeat, that if you have to go to the fascism well, it means you’ve run out of legitimate arguments, so you just scorch the earth instead. Yeah, you ended the discussion, but you lost.

So, what do you call that, exactly? Because we would have called it Godwin’s Law, but Godwin’s Law is something else, so now we have to come up with a new name for it. The Pyrrhic Third Reich Principle? The Law of Hitler’s Bunker (he killed himself, but at least they didn’t take him alive)? It needs a name. Give me a name.

We couldn’t come up with a name, but we did realize in the course of discussing it that we have a lot of laws and principles like that floating around that don’t have names. For example, take “irregardless.” (…Please.) It’s in the dictionary now, “irregardless.” It has no meaning, when you take it apart; it’s the unholy spawn of “regardless” and “irrespective,” but on its own, it’s not really a word. But enough people didn’t care and used it anyway, for enough time, that finally the fine folk at Webster’s just threw up their hands all, “Fine, it’s a word now, we give up.” I feel that that moment — the moment where language prescriptivism falls back in the face of popular application, and an incorrect usage becomes correct — should have a name. A principle, a law — something. A line, maybe. Or a breach! “Huh. Safire says it’s okay to use ‘aggravate’ as a synonym for ‘annoy’ now.” “Ah, another one into the [Name Of Famous Descriptivist] Breach.” I’d name it myself, but I’m a prescriptivist. Any suggestions?

Also in need of a name is that point where your enjoyment of a television show, a formerly good show now in decline, bounces back up even though the show’s quality is still going down, because now you enjoy it for how campy and bad it is. And by “that point,” I mean an actual point on a graph, where the X axis is show quality and the Y axis is enjoyment, and the show quality charts as a diagonal line trending down from left to right, but the enjoyment line is a V. The point where the V is formed is the point I mean — like, if you charted the first three seasons of 24, for example. Both lines head down for a while, but then, partway through Season Two, the enjoyment line would change directions and go back up, because that’s the point at which I accepted that the show had become faintly ridiculous, and decided to just take pleasure in it on that level. What is that point called? The Cougar Uptick? The Camp V?

And what about points and lines that distinguish the real from the parodic? What is the term for a word or phrase which you initially use with heavy sarcasm indicators (air-quoting, eye-rolling, whatever), but then you use the term often enough anyway that the “just kidding” aspect of it falls away and you become a person who really does say “bling”? For instance, my brother and I went through a phase where we started out Snooping every word we said, and then got bored with that and started over-Snooping it, so I tripped over a stone at the beach and busted out with “uch, fucking rock,” which then became “fizzucking rizzock,” which then became “fizznackwang razznockwah,” and it happened on vacation, so not only did that increase the intensity (see above re: boredom) but also my parents got exposed to it and started doing it themselves as a way of making fun of us, as you do, and maybe you have to have met my dad — excuse me, “my diznad-eh” — to think this is funny, but when a middle-aged man in bifocals and Rockports asks if anyone would like to play some pizznang-pozzwong in the bizzasemantwah, it’s funny. But the point is that they still did it. They did it to make fun of it, but they were doing it, and then they just sort of never stopped, and now it’s literally years later and we still get emails signed “Mwam.” So what do we call that? The Over-Snoop Shift? The Dizzy in the Hizzy Shizznaft-eh?

My dad is on the phone with Princeton right now, demanding a full refund. Again.

Anyway, moving on. The Over-Snoop Shift is sort of similar to the principle that states that, in certain art forms, a parody of the form is indistinguishable from the form itself. Porn, soap operas, romance novels — you can’t really write a bad romance novel, because even a good romance novel is by definition bad. (Please, don’t email me. I don’t judge — I can’t, I read true crime by the pound — but it doesn’t make them good.) It’s like they’re satire-proof. What shall we name the principle stating that certain forms are parody-proof — The Passions Principle? Lucci’s Law?

And what shall we name the obscure reference cluster? You know — how you go weeks, months even, without a reference to Caligula, and then, as I did yesterday, you get two in one day from two different sources, whose only point of commonality is you and of which point the sources are ignorant? Because yeah, you could just go with The Obscure Reference Cluster, but to my mind, the name needs to reflect the fact that one reference might in some way induce the other. The Obscure Reference Lightning Rod? Hive-Mind Induction Theory? And while we’re dealing with hive-mind, what to call it when you hear the same band, like, four times in a short period of time on the car radio, and it’s not a band you’d expect to hear because it’s not popular right now, so it’s like you live in an REO Speedwagon feedback loop, and then you speculate that one of the band members must have died? Because it’s probably not that one of the band members died; it’s probably that one company runs all the playlists IN THE WORLD. But every time, I say, out loud, even if I’m alone in the car, “A-noth-er Styx song? Did Dennis DeYoung die?” So that’s…The Clear Channel Death Speculation Venn? What is that?

I know what the bell curve is, at least, but I do need a term for the particular bell curve applying to Chinese food and pizza. See, a bell curve is the graphic representation of normal distribution, which states (wild paraphrase here — again, don’t email) that, in any given group, a few things suck and a few things rock and everything else is kind of okay. The pizza and Chinese food bell curves, however, have more of a top-hat shape, because most pizza and most Chinese food? Fine. Not great, not bad — adequate. Good, even. But it is extremely difficult to make outstanding pizza or Chinese food, and it is extremely difficult to fuck it up, also; in a random sampling, you’ll find far fewer exceptional pieces of pizza or shrimp toast, on either end of the scale, and far more where it’s just, you know, fine. I could go with The Pizza/Chinese Bell Curve. The Mao-ssolini Bell Curve? I don’t know. Help me.

Okay, one more, and this one I think there already is a name for, so all y’all sociologists have to write in because it’s making me crazy. You know how, when you go to Blockbuster or a record store, you have a whole list in your head of movies you want to see and CDs you want to buy, but when you get into the store, you can’t remember any of them and it’s like the giant display of recent and crappy releases stunned your cerebral cortex? I think they call it “choice paralysis” or something like that, but — you know what I mean? Because I call it The Good Burger Mnemonic Boom, and while that’s a good description — a wall of assy movie, and at the foot of it, me, unable to form the words “Woody Allen” — I know it has an official name.

These laws need names, people. I need them to have names; it gives me the illusion of control in a crazy mixed-up world where Britney Spears Federline is permitted to breed. Let’s meme it up in here.

April 25, 2005

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