This one time, in Galilee...

[pozorvlak]

In a world where Smile, Chinese Democracy, Duke Nukem Forever and Perl 6 have all actually been released, what archetype are we meant to use for an over-ambitious, never-to-be-completed project? And what did people use before those projects started? What do people who don't know about computers or rock music use?

The obvious answer, at least in the West, is "the Tower of Babel", but that doesn't quite work: firstly, because an essential aspect of the ToB story (and a more common use of the simile) is that the project failed because of communication breakdown; and secondly, because the ToB project failed not through its inherent overambition, but because said ambition led to one of the stakeholders¹ actively working to sabotage the project. DNF had many, many things working against it, but AFAIK intentional sabotage wasn't one of them.

Which leads me to two related questions:

1) What did people call a Yoko Ono figure before the Beatles? The idea of two close collaborators being driven apart by a woman who captivates Collaborator A and distracts him from his work with Collaborator B seems like it should be as old as Humanity; but the closest I can think of is the Biblical story of David, Uriah and Bathsheba. And again, the parallel doesn't quite work: it's important to that story that the woman was also desired by (indeed, married to) Collaborator B.

2) The Bible, as indicated above, provides a rich store of widely-applicable shared metaphors and allusions. As Western society becomes less Judaeo-Christian (and in particular, more secular), increasingly many people will not understand Biblical allusions. How shall we replace them?

¹ God.

Comments

[johnckirk.livejournal.com]

This may not be the best example (since it's based on a misconception), but the most common analogy I've encountered for a never-ending task is "painting the Forth bridge". The theory is that you start at one end, then by the time you've reached the other end the first bit has rusted away, so you need to start all over again.

This post reminds me of the TNG episode Darmok, where the aliens speak entirely in idioms and Picard doesn't have the shared background to recognise them. Some people criticised that episode, saying that this problem should be blindingly obvious in advance, so the aliens shouldn't be surprised if nobody understands them.

However, I think that it's plausible for references to wind up standing alone, devoid of their cultural/historical context. For instance, I understood what the term "Phyrric victory" meant long before I'd actually heard of General Phyrrus. Similarly, people might use the phrase "crossed the Rubicon" without knowing what the Rubicon is. In my case, I found out about both of those meanings by reading comics: "The Incredible Hulk" (Peter David) and "Y The Last Man" (Brian K. Vaughn), respectively.

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

what archetype are we meant to use for an over-ambitious, never-to-be-completed project?

GNU Hurd, of course.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Of course!

Last commit six days ago (http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/hurd/hurd.git/) - it's still just about alive...