explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

Talk:1013: Wake Up Sheeple

2020-11-04T23:02:53Z

173.245.52.199:

This one is my favorite comic. That is all, nothing constructive to add here. just praise. [[User:Lcarsos|lcarsos]] ([[User talk:Lcarsos|talk]]) 05:33, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

Waking up of ancient creatures may be a reference to "The Cabin in the Woods", the movie that Randall, a fan of Firefly, is likely to have watched. [[Special:Contributions/62.105.129.252|62.105.129.252]] 10:43, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

::Considering the comic came out a month before the movie, it's somewhat unlikely. [[Special:Contributions/192.138.72.196|192.138.72.196]] 13:08, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

"Oh God Oh God Oh God!" should bring some help!--DrMath 06:46, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

Are you sure that the Sheeple are a race? I thought that it was just one giant monster (using the royal "we" in its speech). --[[Special:Contributions/141.101.97.219|141.101.97.219]] 11:23, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
: I agree - there is no indication that there are more than one Sheeple, but the trees(?) in the background and the loud baaa indicates that the one shown is a giant. Also the zoom in on the mega eye goes that way. I have corrected the explain acordingly.[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 07:25, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

I dissagree. "Ten thousand years '''we''' slumbered..." ~ ~ ~ ~ {{unsigned ip|108.162.216.72}}

Aren't they goats? [[Special:Contributions/173.245.48.75|173.245.48.75]] 04:31, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Sheeple is a plural word, if it were just the one you'd have to call is a sheeperson. [[Special:Contributions/173.245.48.135|173.245.48.135]] 16:08, 15 July 2014 (UTC)

:Both sheep and people have a singular sense so it is not impossible that sheeple has too. [[User:Tharkon|Tharkon]] ([[User talk:Tharkon|talk]]) 01:15, 18 July 2014 (UTC)
::But "people" as a singular is a ''collective'' noun. A people is a group such as a nationality or race, not a single individual member [[User:CVictoria|CVictoria]] ([[User talk:CVictoria|talk]]) 19:06, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

Removed the following paragraph:
<pre>This comic may also be a view on Randall's actual political views; the awakened monster in the comic actually represents all the "sheeple". Thus, Randall may be saying that if the "sheeple" wake up and realize that the government is controlling them, without an authority figure (i.e. the government) the sheeple would go wild and pandemonium would ensue.</pre>
It seems to be wild speculation, and unless there is something to back it up, I think it should remain removed from the explanation. [[User:Suspender guy|Suspender guy]] ([[User talk:Suspender guy|talk]]) 13:06, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
:This looks like a valid interpretation to me. It says "may", couching it as just an interpretation. We never know which of us Randall is more similar to, that we guessed the interpretation he had in his mind better than somebody else. Thanks so much for preserving it instead of just erasing it. [[Special:Contributions/173.245.52.199|173.245.52.199]] 23:02, 4 November 2020 (UTC)

There may be a connection to Tom Smith's song, "Sheep Marketing Ploy." The song describes a series of imaginary horror movies about "Fenton, the Death Sheep from Hell," who has a deep and ominous "Baaa." [[User:Gmcgath|Gmcgath]] ([[User talk:Gmcgath|talk]]) 20:40, 22 October 2016 (UTC)

Is that a shepherd's crook it's holding? Subtle, yet serious, irony... [[Special:Contributions/108.162.219.154|108.162.219.154]] 12:39, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

2381: The True Name of the Bear

2020-11-04T22:57:05Z

173.245.52.199: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 2381
| date = November 4, 2020
| title = The True Name of the Bear
| image = the_true_name_of_the_bear.png
| titletext = Thank you to Gretchen McCulloch for fielding this question, and sorry that as a result the world's foremost internet linguist has been devoured by the brown one. She will be missed.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by THE BEAR WHO MUST NOT BE NAMED. Sir, madam, or variation thereupon under the username Gbisaga, your linguistic speculations are honestly interesting. However, they’re original research. Please find a citation. Another Reader says: Now, I thought the point here was to explain the comic, not be encyclopedic, no? Randall discusses a lot of obscurely known things that don't have good citations available (mostly regarding STEM culture). Not true for etymology I suppose. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

The Canadian Internet linguist {{w|Gretchen McCulloch}} [https://twitter.com/gretchenamcc/status/1113195661275611137 tweeted] about [https://www.charlierussellbears.com/LinguisticArchaeology.html the theory] that the word for bear became taboo in some branches of Indoeuropean languages - notably the Germanic one - and it was replaced by euphemisms. In the Germanic branch, the euphemism may have been like "the brown one" and words for bear derive from words for "brown".

The Indoeuropean root for bear is *rkto-, which has been inferred from languages that use words derived from it. In the comic, Gretchen McCulloch applies {{w|Sound change|sound shifting}} laws to it to guess how it would have evolved into English, but pronouncing it seems to actually summon a bear, showing that abandoning that word was a fairly wise move for the Germanic language family. Interestingly enough, the hypothesized word “arth” is the same as the Welsh and Cornish for the word “bear.” Welsh belongs to the Celtic language family, which is one of the Indoeuropean branches that still uses a word derived from *rkto-, as the Italic (Romance), Greek and Indoarian (Sanscrit) branches do, while Germanic, Slavic and Baltic branches abandoned it for different euphemisms.

Depending on how one takes the concept of " saying a true name", there may be a consistency problem with the comic. If saying the "true" name (or any name derived from that name) summons the bear, how is it that the Welsh and most Romance language speakers (e.g. Italians saying Orso, Spaniards saying Oso, etc) get away without being constantly mauled? One explanation might be if the bears only respond to certain languages, but that seems unlikely unless the words mutated specifically into some special sound bears responded to, since the languages that the bears would be prompted by would have developed thousands of years apart in time. An arcane form of {{w|geofencing}}, and/or a {{w|geas}} firmly tied to some prior mystically-established meta-contextualising, might limit such otherworldly 'magic' and explain why more mundane science and logic is usually unworried by these kinds of phenomena being inadvertently triggered.

A view on speaking of bears that is much more likely, is that the cultures were such that when other human beings heard the clear word for bear, they would behave in ways that people did not desire. For example, maybe when someone had a good harvest bears would have a tendency to come into town to investigate or raid their food store. After some time, people might have developed a tendency to discuss bears and lock up their food store after a good harvest, and so if people overheard discussion of bears from their neighbors, they might have all locked down their food stores, and the bears could have learned to key in on the behavior of everyone locking their food stores to actually come into the city and raid them more in response. There are a lot of rational reasons that avoiding speaking of bears to keep them away could have been a real thing that actually worked.

Another possibility is that the "true name" of a bear is actually in a language the bear understands: possibly involving smells, body language, territorial or ecological interspecies behavior, and would actually reliably summon a bear because the person using it knew exactly what they were doing. Hunter-gatherers and very experienced trackers are known to interact with wildlife in such ways.

Use of true names appears to be [[1013: Wake Up Sheeple|highly effective in the xkcd universe, rather like a fairy tale.]].

Internet Linguist Gretchen McCulloch (or her ghost) certainly found it effective, but https://twitter.com/GretchenAMcC/status/1324044826145378304 may reflect her extreme susceptibility to internet leakage.

Some say a true name contains clear meaning of who someone or something really is. In a competitive culture like ours, this could give others power over you, "profiling" you to be able to predict you and what you do.

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

:[Megan walks in front the left, looking down at her phone. Cueball and Ponytail are standing next to each other.]
:Megan: Wow - according to the internet, we don't know the true name of the bear.
:Cueball: What?

:[Gretchen comes on-panel from the right.]
:Megan: Apparently there was a superstition that saying its name would summon it. "Bear" and "bruin" mean "the brown one." Its actual name has been lost.
:Cueball: Wow.
:Ponytail: Gretchen, is this for real?

:[Zoom-in on Gretchen.]
:Gretchen: Well, sort of
:Gretchen: The Proto-Indo-European root was *rkto-
:Gretchen: It was lost in the Germanic languages like English, but survived elsewhere, e.g. Greek "arktos" and Latin "ursus"

:[Back to the second panel, with Megan holding her phone down, Ponytail with her hands in the air, and Gretchen with his hand on his chin.]
:Megan: So could we figure out what the word would have been in English?
:Gretchen: Hmm. I mean, we'll never know, but given Germanic sound shifts, a reasonable guess might be "arth"?
:Ponytail: ''No!!''

:[The panel zooms in again to Gretchen.]
:Ponytail (off-panel): ''Stop! AAAAA!''
:Gretchen: What??
:Ponytail (off-panel): Don't ''say'' it!

:[Ponytail is holding her palms out. Megan is no longer in the panel.]
:Ponytail: What have you ''done''?
:Off-panel noise: <big>'''''ROAR'''''</big>
:Gretchen: Oh
:Gretchen: Oh no

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]
[[Category:Comics featuring real people]]
[[Category:Language]]
[[Category:Animals]]

2381: The True Name of the Bear

2020-11-04T22:53:37Z

173.245.52.199:

{{comic
| number = 2381
| date = November 4, 2020
| title = The True Name of the Bear
| image = the_true_name_of_the_bear.png
| titletext = Thank you to Gretchen McCulloch for fielding this question, and sorry that as a result the world's foremost internet linguist has been devoured by the brown one. She will be missed.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by THE BEAR WHO MUST NOT BE NAMED. Sir, madam, or variation thereupon under the username Gbisaga, your linguistic speculations are honestly interesting. However, they’re original research. Please find a citation. Another Reader says: Now, I thought the point here was to explain the comic, not be encyclopedic, no? Randall discusses a lot of obscurely known things that don't have good citations available (mostly regarding STEM culture). Not true for etymology I suppose. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

The Canadian Internet linguist {{w|Gretchen McCulloch}} [https://twitter.com/gretchenamcc/status/1113195661275611137 tweeted] about [https://www.charlierussellbears.com/LinguisticArchaeology.html the theory] that the word for bear became taboo in some branches of Indoeuropean languages - notably the Germanic one - and it was replaced by euphemisms. In the Germanic branch, the euphemism may have been like "the brown one" and words for bear derive from words for "brown".

The Indoeuropean root for bear is *rkto-, which has been inferred from languages that use words derived from it. In the comic, Gretchen McCulloch applies {{w|Sound change|sound shifting}} laws to it to guess how it would have evolved into English, but pronouncing it seems to actually summon a bear, showing that abandoning that word was a fairly wise move for the Germanic language family. Interestingly enough, the hypothesized word “arth” is the same as the Welsh and Cornish for the word “bear.” Welsh belongs to the Celtic language family, which is one of the Indoeuropean branches that still uses a word derived from *rkto-, as the Italic (Romance), Greek and Indoarian (Sanscrit) branches do, while Germanic, Slavic and Baltic branches abandoned it for different euphemisms.

Depending on how one takes the concept of " saying a true name", there may be a consistency problem with the comic. If saying the "true" name (or any name derived from that name) summons the bear, how is it that the Welsh and most Romance language speakers (e.g. Italians saying Orso, Spaniards saying Oso, etc) get away without being constantly mauled? One explanation might be if the bears only respond to certain languages, but that seems unlikely unless the words mutated specifically into some special sound bears responded to, since the languages that the bears would be prompted by would have developed thousands of years apart in time. An arcane form of {{w|geofencing}}, and/or a {{w|geas}} firmly tied to some prior mystically-established meta-contextualising, might limit such otherworldly 'magic' and explain why more mundane science and logic is usually unworried by these kinds of phenomena being inadvertently triggered.

A view on speaking of bears that is much more likely, is that the cultures were such that when other human beings heard the clear word for bear, they would behave in ways that people did not desire. For example, maybe when someone had a good harvest bears would have a tendency to come into town to investigate or raid their food store. After some time, people might have developed a tendency to discuss bears and lock up their food store after a good harvest, and so if people overheard discussion of bears from their neighbors, they might have all locked down their food stores, and the bears could have learned to key in on the behavior of everyone locking their food stores to actually come into the city and raid them more in response. There are a lot of rational reasons that avoiding speaking of bears to keep them away could have been a real thing that actually worked.

Use of true names appears to be [[1013: Wake Up Sheeple|highly effective in the xkcd universe, rather like a fairy tale.]].

Internet Linguist Gretchen McCulloch (or her ghost) certainly found it effective, but https://twitter.com/GretchenAMcC/status/1324044826145378304 may reflect her extreme susceptibility to internet leakage.

Some say a true name contains clear meaning of who someone or something really is. In a competitive culture like ours, this could give others power over you, "profiling" you to be able to predict you and what you do.

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

:[Megan walks in front the left, looking down at her phone. Cueball and Ponytail are standing next to each other.]
:Megan: Wow - according to the internet, we don't know the true name of the bear.
:Cueball: What?

:[Gretchen comes on-panel from the right.]
:Megan: Apparently there was a superstition that saying its name would summon it. "Bear" and "bruin" mean "the brown one." Its actual name has been lost.
:Cueball: Wow.
:Ponytail: Gretchen, is this for real?

:[Zoom-in on Gretchen.]
:Gretchen: Well, sort of
:Gretchen: The Proto-Indo-European root was *rkto-
:Gretchen: It was lost in the Germanic languages like English, but survived elsewhere, e.g. Greek "arktos" and Latin "ursus"

:[Back to the second panel, with Megan holding her phone down, Ponytail with her hands in the air, and Gretchen with his hand on his chin.]
:Megan: So could we figure out what the word would have been in English?
:Gretchen: Hmm. I mean, we'll never know, but given Germanic sound shifts, a reasonable guess might be "arth"?
:Ponytail: ''No!!''

:[The panel zooms in again to Gretchen.]
:Ponytail (off-panel): ''Stop! AAAAA!''
:Gretchen: What??
:Ponytail (off-panel): Don't ''say'' it!

:[Ponytail is holding her palms out. Megan is no longer in the panel.]
:Ponytail: What have you ''done''?
:Off-panel noise: <big>'''''ROAR'''''</big>
:Gretchen: Oh
:Gretchen: Oh no

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]
[[Category:Comics featuring real people]]
[[Category:Language]]
[[Category:Animals]]

2381: The True Name of the Bear

2020-11-04T22:51:41Z

173.245.52.199:

{{comic
| number = 2381
| date = November 4, 2020
| title = The True Name of the Bear
| image = the_true_name_of_the_bear.png
| titletext = Thank you to Gretchen McCulloch for fielding this question, and sorry that as a result the world's foremost internet linguist has been devoured by the brown one. She will be missed.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by THE BEAR WHO MUST NOT BE NAMED. Sir, madam, or variation thereupon under the username Gbisaga, your linguistic speculations are honestly interesting. However, they’re original research. Please find a citation. Another Reader says: Now, I thought the point here was to explain the comic, not be encyclopedic, no? Randall discusses a lot of obscurely known things that don't have good citations available (mostly regarding STEM culture). Not true for etymology I suppose. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

The Canadian Internet linguist {{w|Gretchen McCulloch}} [https://twitter.com/gretchenamcc/status/1113195661275611137 tweeted] about [https://www.charlierussellbears.com/LinguisticArchaeology.html the theory] that the word for bear became taboo in some branches of Indoeuropean languages - notably the Germanic one - and it was replaced by euphemisms. In the Germanic branch, the euphemism may have been like "the brown one" and words for bear derive from words for "brown".

The Indoeuropean root for bear is *rkto-, which has been inferred from languages that use words derived from it. In the comic, Gretchen McCulloch applies {{w|Sound change|sound shifting}} laws to it to guess how it would have evolved into English, but pronouncing it seems to actually summon a bear, showing that abandoning that word was a fairly wise move for the Germanic language family. Interestingly enough, the hypothesized word “arth” is the same as the Welsh and Cornish for the word “bear.” Welsh belongs to the Celtic language family, which is one of the Indoeuropean branches that still uses a word derived from *rkto-, as the Italic (Romance), Greek and Indoarian (Sanscrit) branches do, while Germanic, Slavic and Baltic branches abandoned it for different euphemisms.

Depending on how one takes the concept of " saying a true name", there may be a consistency problem with the comic. If saying the "true" name (or any name derived from that name) summons the bear, how is it that the Welsh and most Romance language speakers (e.g. Italians saying Orso, Spaniards saying Oso, etc) get away without being constantly mauled? One explanation might be if the bears only respond to certain languages, but that seems unlikely since the languages that the bears would be prompted by would have developed thousands of years apart in time. An arcane form of {{w|geofencing}}, and/or a {{w|geas}} firmly tied to some prior mystically-established meta-contextualising, might limit such otherworldly 'magic' and explain why more mundane science and logic is usually unworried by these kinds of phenomena being inadvertently triggered.

A view on speaking of bears that is much more likely, is that the cultures were such that when other human beings heard the clear word for bear, they would behave in ways that people did not desire. For example, maybe when someone had a good harvest bears would have a tendency to come into town to investigate or raid their food store. After some time, people might have developed a tendency to discuss bears and lock up their food store after a good harvest, and so if people overheard discussion of bears from their neighbors, they might have all locked down their food stores, and the bears could have learned to key in on the behavior of everyone locking their food stores to actually come into the city and raid them more in response. There are a lot of rational reasons that avoiding speaking of bears to keep them away could have been a real thing that actually worked.

Use of true names appears to be [[1013: Wake Up Sheeple|highly effective in the xkcd universe, rather like a fairy tale.]].

Internet Linguist Gretchen McCulloch (or her ghost) certainly found it effective, but https://twitter.com/GretchenAMcC/status/1324044826145378304 may reflect her extreme susceptibility to internet leakage.

Some say a true name contains clear meaning of who someone or something really is. In a competitive culture like ours, this could give others power over you, "profiling" you to be able to predict you and what you do.

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

:[Megan walks in front the left, looking down at her phone. Cueball and Ponytail are standing next to each other.]
:Megan: Wow - according to the internet, we don't know the true name of the bear.
:Cueball: What?

:[Gretchen comes on-panel from the right.]
:Megan: Apparently there was a superstition that saying its name would summon it. "Bear" and "bruin" mean "the brown one." Its actual name has been lost.
:Cueball: Wow.
:Ponytail: Gretchen, is this for real?

:[Zoom-in on Gretchen.]
:Gretchen: Well, sort of
:Gretchen: The Proto-Indo-European root was *rkto-
:Gretchen: It was lost in the Germanic languages like English, but survived elsewhere, e.g. Greek "arktos" and Latin "ursus"

:[Back to the second panel, with Megan holding her phone down, Ponytail with her hands in the air, and Gretchen with his hand on his chin.]
:Megan: So could we figure out what the word would have been in English?
:Gretchen: Hmm. I mean, we'll never know, but given Germanic sound shifts, a reasonable guess might be "arth"?
:Ponytail: ''No!!''

:[The panel zooms in again to Gretchen.]
:Ponytail (off-panel): ''Stop! AAAAA!''
:Gretchen: What??
:Ponytail (off-panel): Don't ''say'' it!

:[Ponytail is holding her palms out. Megan is no longer in the panel.]
:Ponytail: What have you ''done''?
:Off-panel noise: <big>'''''ROAR'''''</big>
:Gretchen: Oh
:Gretchen: Oh no

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]
[[Category:Comics featuring real people]]
[[Category:Language]]
[[Category:Animals]]

654: Nachos

2014-07-04T20:07:21Z

173.245.52.199: Plenty of FPS games have headshots, not necessarily TF2

{{comic
| number = 654
| date = October 26, 2009
| title = Nachos
| image = nachos.png
| titletext = Hey, gaming on wifi? You have only yourself to blame.
}}

==Explanation==
[[Megan]] and [[Ponytail]] are playing an online shooter game. Ponytail calls [[Cueball]], who is living with Megan, and "subtly" persuades him to make {{w|nachos}}. {{w|Wi-Fi}} and {{w|microwave oven}}s both use {{w|ISM band|radio frequencies around 2.4 GHz}}, so Cueball's cooking disrupts her connection and allows Ponytail to kill Megan's online character.

The title text points out that Megan has only herself to blame, as gaming on wifi is more susceptible to such issues than gaming with a wired connection (e.g. {{w|Ethernet}}).

==Transcript==
:[Cueball is on the phone with Ponytail, who's on her computer in the other half of a split panel.]
:Cueball: Hello? ... Oh, hey. Looking for Megan? She's gaming.
:Ponytail: I know. You know what's delicious? Nachos.

:[Ponytail clicks on her computer while talking.]
:Ponytail: When you layer the cheese so it gets on every chip... then smother them in sour cream and salsa...

:Cueball: Mm, that IS delicious. And I've got the ingredients, too!
:Ponytail, on phone: You should make some!
:Cueball: I will!
:Ponytail, on phone: Hurry.

:[Cueball is making nachos in the microwave.]
:Microwave: ''beep beep whirrrr''

:Megan, at her computer: My wifi signal!

:[Ponytail who called is at her computer.]
:Computer: Boom! Headshot.

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]

191: Lojban

2013-11-04T02:14:43Z

173.245.52.199: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 191
| date = December 1, 2006
| title = Lojban
| image = lojban.png
| titletext = zo'o ta jitfa .i .e'o xu do pendo mi
}}

==Explanation==
{{w|Lojban}} is a constructed language designed to be logical, unambiguous, and culturally neutral. The authors originally designed it as an experiment, but a few people have picked it up and tried to learn it. However, anyone actually willing to learn Lojban is someone [[Black Hat]] would rather avoid.

Clicking on the original comic brings you to [[:File:lojban translated.png|a Lojban translation of the comic]].

The title-text is also written in Lojban. It translates roughly as: "That was a joke. Really. Wanna be friends with me?"

==Transcript==
:;English
:Cueball: If you learned to speak Lojban, your communication would be completely unambiguous and logical.
:Black Hat: Yeah, but it would all be with the kind of people who learn Lojban.

:;Lojban
:Cueball: da'i ganai do crebi'o la lojban gi le se cusku be do cu mulno pavysmu je logji
:Black Hat: .i .ie ku'i cusku fi le prenu klesi poi certu la lojban

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Language]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Black Hat]]