Someone told me about Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. Now I see references to it everywhere.
While I independently arrived at the joke, I immediately suspected that, somewhere on the internet, someone had probably made it before.
I was right.
I hate when I make an original joke and then find previous occurences of it, like, everywhere. There should be a term for that. I suppose if someone thought they were so brilliant that nobody could possibly have come up with the same joke before, they might have Baader-Meinhof-Dunning-Kruger Effect. I suggested this to my nephew, who replied that the compound term might better describe the scenario where you think you know more than you do about a thing you've recently learned about and started seeing everywhere.
We love our labelled syndromes.
Take the Mandela Effect. Look, if someone wants to tell me that zillions of people recalled that Nelson Mandela died in the 1980s, only to learn much later that they were wrong, perhaps that happened. But he was the first Black person elected to the presidency of South Africa, and was very much on the world stage in the 1990s. Famously, he spent New Year's Eve, 1999, in his old prison cell, as a symbolic gesture. He was let out the next morning and returned to the presidency. He was, in short, an individual of some prominence.
I have not met a single person who thought that he died in the 1980s.
Sure, we confabulate memories and can make mistakes. Some of the other oft-cited examples of the "Mandela Effect" even seem probable. Misremembering, "No, I am your father" as "Luke, I am your father" seems like a reasonable misrecollection. Without additional context, the actual line makes little sense, nor does it specifically evoke the Star Wars saga. Thinking that Monopoly's Rich Uncle Pennybags once wore a monocle? Okay.... A monocle wouldn't be out of place on his face. He does look a little like Mr. Peanut and also the Turtles chocolates mascot, both of whom sport one.
But Nelson Mandela's death? Perhaps a lot of people really did conflate (1) the fact that he was imprisoned for many years and (2) the fact that, after December 15, 2013, he was dead, into a memory of him dying in prison. I question how widespread the misrecollection ever was. The use of this term to describe misremembering/false memories was coined by Fiona Broome, a paranormal researcher who thought that such memories might be evidence of parallel universes. Her sourcing consists of her own false memory about Mandela's death and anecdotes that she collected after asking people when Mandela died. From this, Broome makes a sweeping generalization.
I'm wondering if the example for which the Mandela Effect receives its pop culture name isn't something else, namely, that phenomenon where something that is atypical becomes the example of a thing. I can't find a name for this. If someone can help me, please let me know.
Let's call it Dubious Example Syndrome.
Let me give some examples. They're at least as evidentially solid as Fiona Broome's.
Ask people to name a superhero. At least one of them will name Batman. Batman is one of the most popular superheroes in the world. He's iconic.
He also lacks superpowers, unless we count Seanbaby's claim that Bruce Wayne has the amazing ability to shove twelve toolsheds worth of equipment into his utility belt. Actually, a lot of superheroes lack superpowers, even though that would seem to be a definitional quality. The original 1940s Justice Society of America was divided between overpowered beings with abilities so far beyond the ken of other mortals that they should have ended World War II in a week, and tough people in strange outfits with no real powers beyond fighting skills and a sense of justice. Okay, a few of these had a minor power. Dr. Mid-Nite, for example, could see in the dark. He was blind during the day, unless he wore dark glasses. Otherwise, he made his way with fighting skills and a medical degree-- this latter point must have worked to the benefit of the non-superpowered half of his associates.
Or Surf Rock. Name a surf rock band.
Did you think of the Beach Boys or Jan and Dean? If you did, you're probably really old. You're also not entirely wrong, but neither are you right. A compilation of old surf music would probably include both artists, who used upbeat pop rhythms and vocal harmonies as they sang about an endless summer, the beach, surfing, and hot cars. Many people would identify the Beach Boys as "surf rock." But surf rock, as originally defined, consists of instrumental, driving rock and roll with a distinct beat, buzzing, reverb-heavy guitars, and few or (more often) no vocals, much less harmonized ones.
Beach Boy Surf Rock Syndrome?
Or do we have a name for the related phenomenon whereby something that was atypical for a time or place or culture comes to represent that time or place or culture?
I cannot count how many times I heard, when I was younger, that the Victorians were so d-mnably prudish that they put little leggings on piano legs.
Except that they didn't. At least, not as a rule.
In 1839, Captain Frederick Marryat, a British naval officer and an actual subject of Victoria, published A Diary in America. It includes many amusing anecdotes about the colourful culture on the other side of the ditch. He chuckles over being told that a gentleman only refers to a leg as a "limb" in the presence of a lady, though he has only one lady as a source for this information. On another occasion, he encounters a piano in a seminary with "modest little trousers" on its limbs to maintain decorum.
He presents this fact as humorous.
Some people did cover piano legs in order to protect them from injury or for ornamentation, but even this practice does not appear to have been particularly widespread. The point here is that the Victorians for whom Marryat wrote thought that covering piano limbs for reasons of modesty was funny, an exaggerated example of specifically American prudery.
Yet, not so many decades later, the practice was being misrepresented as typical of Victorian attitudes.*
Or those Japanese teenage girl underwear dispensing machines that were so much discussed in the 1990s and early 2000s as an example of how oddly Japanese culture blended technology and sexuality. Such machines existed-- sort of. It was possible, in a culture with a great many vending machines, to find the occasional, discreetly-located underwear dispensing machine, but most of these dispensed brand new or faux worn underwear. Whether any of it came from actual schoolgirls remains an open question. Many people were scandalized when their existence became known. The police cracked down on the practice, such that it existed. Tokyo's Regulations Concerning the Sound Upbringing of Tokyo Youth bans the trafficking in the soiled/worn clothing of anyone under the age of 18. There were never very many of these things and, far from being typical of Japanese culture, they were, when discovered, widely perceived as distasteful. Yet J.T. Quigly's 2014 article in TechinAsia recounts his encounter with someone in Akihabara who states that "panty vending machines are one of the first things" that he "heard about Japan."
Of course, online, pretty much anywhere in the world, one can snarf up used or supposedly soiled women's underpants-- the sale of such things was a plot on one season of Orange is the New Black-- but that fact tells us nothing about Japanese culture. It tells us about a creepy cross-cultural paraphilia.
And thus concludes my daylog, a fairly solid example of Ranty Online Post Syndrome.
*Although I have done exactly no research on the matter, I am convinced that African-American horror stories about Caucasians putting raisins in potato salad are a similar sort of thing. I have been Caucasian all of my life and I have never once made or been served potato salad with raisins. Look, I'll cop to putting mayonaise on my sandwiches and benefiting from a culture of widespread institutionalized racism, but this raisin thing is just too much. Maybe it's true-- but maybe, just maybe, one taste-challenged White family served some unfortunate Black guests potato salad with raisins, and the rest of us have taken the heat for that ever since.