Associate me, baby
Last night, while sculling blissfully in the wave of an alcohol high (an inevitable product of having one beer too many), a friend cornered me on the stairway and demanded: "What's your phrase, Rachel?" After a few moments of drunken attempts at clarification, it finally dawned on me that he was asking me what phrase or word I uttered most often. I supposed that the implicit underlying question was "What can I identify you with?"
And so while I stood there supplying my incisive half of the conversation about his identifying phrase ("Wookookoo!!!" - it's fantastic), I couldn't help but let my mind drift, wondering if it was an inherently human characteristic to constantly seek identification by association. Everyone has done it in some way. Gangsters like wearing black; little baby boys are dressed in blue while little baby girls are dressed in pink; the entire concept of trademarks rests upon identification by association; some people have personal logos which they lovingly inscribe on everything from schoolbooks to their own bodies...the list is endless. In school, someone would be "the guy with the father who owns such-and-such company", or "the really good basketball player", or "that really really amazing pianist", or "the guy who plays classical guitar", or even "so-and-so's brother" (or in my case, "Kristel's sister") :P
I suppose that it is because our brains work in this way - by association. Identifying someone by something else related to them is probably the easiest way to identify someone, in a society where unprecedented emphasis is placed on knowing someone's name, when the name is quite possibly one of the most useless sources of information about a person's character and history.
Well anyway, it reminded me of Terry Pratchett's witches. One of the witches wears the pointy hat of a witch because it makes her recognizable as a witch. What I want to know is, does the act of wearing the pointy hat make her a witch, or does the fact that she is a witch make the hat a witch's one? Could a witch wear a Lakers cap and expect to be recognized as a witch? Probably not. Stereotypes are formed on association by identification, but simultaneously people endorse the stereotype by conforming to them, which then strengthens the stereotype...and the circle continues. So, in the example of the witch, at some point in history a witch decided to wear a pointy hat, and she was recognized as a witch. But the next witch decided to wear that same pointy hat because she wanted to be recognized as a witch. And meanwhile, the village they terrorized began to associate pointy hats with witches. If that first witch had been a Lakers fan, ancient myth and folklore might have been...so very different.
At that point, Kevin started doing his "Wookookoo" dance, and my train of thought was completely derailed. Anyway, I forgot to say it yesterday, but welcome to August (as if it's mine to welcome you to, hah).
PS - I do not have a phrase.