Hidden meaning

Posted on February 11, 2004 @ 11:09 in Research

I cannot help but make obscure references and encode (semi)private meanings into everything I write. Have a look at the very bottom of the navigation bar on this page; now hover your mouse pointer over the "It's Vee-4-Ooh!" area. That little paragraph has a HTML title attribute that reads: "aggravated mopery and dopery."

That's a reference to Pat Cadigan's Doré Konstantin novels, in which the protagonist is a detective who has the unenviable task to investigate crimes committed in online environments without much help from a law that doesn't yet recognize virtual characters and assets as "real." Konstantin uses the phrase "aggravated mopery and dopery" to describe the misdoings of the users and their virtual characters in those online environments. I stuck it in there, because I was reading those novels when developing this layout, and because I wanted to comment on the process of writing a CSS design that works across a range of browsers. IE's misbehavior and willful misinterpretations of the laws of the W3C particularly struck me as aggravated mopery and dopery.

I don't expect many, if any, people to get those little hints. Still, I'm always chuckling to myself when I've managed to work some "hidden" reference into a text and I enjoy rediscovering those hidden meanings when I happen to reread something I've written before. Recently I read an article of my thesis advisor that opened with the line: "It was a dark and stormy night..." That's a reference to the opening sentence of Bulwer-Lytton's famously crappy writing. Finding such a little gem, understanding the reference and the irony with which it was written, is great. I e-mailed her to say I enjoyed it and she replied that I was only the second person to catch that reference. So few people to catch a little in-joke, but maybe that's part of the fun... it's not for everybody. I'm sure I miss a whole lot of funny references because I just don't know what the writer is referring to.

I wonder though if many people more or less consciously encode private and thus largely hidden meanings in their work... Do you?

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  1. I put easter eggs into a Flash based poem of mine, riverrunning.

    http://slope.org/archive/issue17/hyper_barr.html

    If you download the source, there are messages in the grey design space outside the viewable frame. And I made poems out of the Library and Layer listings. And so on.

    There's some joy in hiding something that you know will reward some soul who finds it.

    Posted by Brandon on February 11, 2004 @ 13:18

  2. Yes, I do. It's like those old Smiths vinyl records, where Morrissey would have strange sentences etched into the run-out groove. When I found out that the title attribute returns a "tooltip" text (urgh, I think I'm turning Microsoftese), I started using it for extra explanations on certain areas, but very soon also found myself including "easter egg" texts for other bits.

    Posted by Arjan on February 16, 2004 @ 13:23

  3. Yes, you've just reminded me of something I used to do when I was very young.
    I used to put little slips of paper into the back sleeves of library books that I enjoyed. I'd just write a very short note saying "If you liked this book I'm sure I'd like you. What are your other favourite books?"
    It was about a kind of random connection, a message in a bottle, I guess.
    Amazon.com does it a whole lot better now though.

    Posted by Marion on February 20, 2004 @ 21:43

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