Fearman's definitions
1) Spherical creatures with bottomless throats and a voracious appetite, the eponymous entities of the first novella in the Stephen King quartet Four Past Midnight.
The world of life and consciousness is forever passing down the stream of time, and the uninhabited, chemically inert world left behind - inadvertently visited by sleeping passengers on a plane that flies through a time rift - awaits being carved up by the jaws of what one character refers to as the timekeepers of eternity, but which might more accurately be described as the blow-fly larvae of the space-time continuum. From a distance, the sound of their munching is somewhat like the sound of radio static ... and that is as close as you want to get. As another character, Craig Toomey, envisions them, these creatures are purpose personified; in the horror stories he heard as a child from his insanely pushy father he was told how their sole purpose is to chase down all the lazy people who are not working frantically enough and eat them alive.
2) Referred to when something urgently needs doing, like a college essay due in the morning.
The world of life and consciousness is forever passing down the stream of time, and the uninhabited, chemically inert world left behind - inadvertently visited by sleeping passengers on a plane that flies through a time rift - awaits being carved up by the jaws of what one character refers to as the timekeepers of eternity, but which might more accurately be described as the blow-fly larvae of the space-time continuum. From a distance, the sound of their munching is somewhat like the sound of radio static ... and that is as close as you want to get. As another character, Craig Toomey, envisions them, these creatures are purpose personified; in the horror stories he heard as a child from his insanely pushy father he was told how their sole purpose is to chase down all the lazy people who are not working frantically enough and eat them alive.
2) Referred to when something urgently needs doing, like a college essay due in the morning.
But the sound-wave rolled on toward them - the crunching, smacking, eating sound of the langoliers. (Four Past Midnight, p. 233).
Gotta go. Thesis to finish by next week. Langoliers.
Gotta go. Thesis to finish by next week. Langoliers.
by Fearman September 28, 2007
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Get the chocolate mug.Pronounced "chum-ling". Inventing detailed rules of etiquette out of whole cloth in an attempt to help people put on airs, or to put them on oneself. From a 1980s magazine advert purporting to show how best to consume certain fashionable wafery mints. A sad waste of what often could have been a brilliant imagination. May be intended satirically, although never of course taken that way by devoted etiquette freaks.
by Fearman March 4, 2008
Get the Cholmondelling mug.Postmodernism: pseudo-intellectual Trojan Horse of tyrants everywhere in the western world. Began in Arts faculties in various universities under "thinkers" like Derrida, Baudrillard, Foucault and Irigaray, and spread like a cancer into at least the "soft" sciences, if not further afield.
Works insidiously by establishing in the minds of the faithful that there are no ultimate truths in either a moral or a scientific sense, and dressing up bullshit in flowery language. Postmodernism pretends to be a guarantor of pluralism (a concept far better served, btw, by rational debate), and is in love with concepts such as the "transgressive" and the "paradigm shift". Unfortunately these matters are brought up in the midst of reams and reams of tendentious twaddle which constitute a dreadful waste of perfectly good trees, and the most notable effect of postmodernist (un)thinking is not the freeing of anyone's mind from conservative tyranny, but the scrapping of the very idea of objective truth. Once this happens, of course, what follows (outside the ivory towers of academia) is that the game goes, set and match, to the fellah with the biggest guns. Many conservative factions claimed that September 11 spelled the end of postmodernism. Ohhhh nooo, postmodernist twaddle was only just getting its boots on.
To take an (admittedly anachronistic) example of what is essentially the same thing:
"A new and magical understanding of the world is on the rise, one based on will rather than truth. There is no truth, in either the scientific or the moral sense."
- Adolf Hitler
Works insidiously by establishing in the minds of the faithful that there are no ultimate truths in either a moral or a scientific sense, and dressing up bullshit in flowery language. Postmodernism pretends to be a guarantor of pluralism (a concept far better served, btw, by rational debate), and is in love with concepts such as the "transgressive" and the "paradigm shift". Unfortunately these matters are brought up in the midst of reams and reams of tendentious twaddle which constitute a dreadful waste of perfectly good trees, and the most notable effect of postmodernist (un)thinking is not the freeing of anyone's mind from conservative tyranny, but the scrapping of the very idea of objective truth. Once this happens, of course, what follows (outside the ivory towers of academia) is that the game goes, set and match, to the fellah with the biggest guns. Many conservative factions claimed that September 11 spelled the end of postmodernism. Ohhhh nooo, postmodernist twaddle was only just getting its boots on.
To take an (admittedly anachronistic) example of what is essentially the same thing:
"A new and magical understanding of the world is on the rise, one based on will rather than truth. There is no truth, in either the scientific or the moral sense."
- Adolf Hitler
They didn't find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but Blair says they still except to find them and he walks in hope! How beautifully in line with the creed of postmodernism!
A recent postmodernism-infected view of the war in Iraq explained that Bush and Blair were "creating new realities" for the rest of the world to study.
A recent postmodernism-infected view of the war in Iraq explained that Bush and Blair were "creating new realities" for the rest of the world to study.
by Fearman July 16, 2007
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by Fearman October 30, 2007
Get the sharp and pearlies mug.To play the banjo with someone; to try to make friends with someone who isn't going to be friends or who keeps dodgy company, typically rough, bigoted or violent. From the banjo duet in John Boorman's "Deliverance".
Although they had been making funny noises at me across the square, I just had to play the banjo with those guys. I regretted it within the week.
by Fearman August 7, 2007
Get the play the banjo with mug.An attempt to make oneself appear squeaky clean, carried to such extremes of austerity or public self-righteousness that this person has just gotta be hiding something.
Jerry's pretending he doesn't feel attracted to Ralph, and going about talking about cleanliness of mind and body as he attends meetings of this group of homophobic God-botherers. He's obviously playing the Pope Gambit.
by Fearman February 22, 2008
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