Friday, January 04, 2013

LAME (Look At Me Everybody)

Other Terms and/or Related Concepts

Self aggrandisement; Disingenuous posturing

Description

The advocate makes a disingenuous claim or statement that is clearly intended to focus attention on the advocate rather than the issue under discussion. LAMEness is a state of mind that can be identified by the pointlessness of an advocate's statements, and more often than not, the pointlessness of the advocate. A LAME claim is a suspect assertion which seems on closer examination to be made not to solve a problem, or to get closer to the truth, but as an exercise in self-promotion.

Example

david doyle is a well respected researcher in the Strategic Heuristics and Insight Technologies unit at large social media company. The lower case spelling of his name is not a typographical error. david had his name legally changed to remove the capitalisation. He also writes "i" (lower case) to refer to himself. In his own words:
i have always been annoyed that the english language insists we capitalise the first person singular pronoun. This is so egocentric. i thought the world wasn't meant to revolve around US! But written language puts me at the center??? And following in from this, why should we capitalise names? my name is simply one way of labelling me; i'm not it. Why does this label warrant more significance than all others? i say no, which is why i write 'i' in lower case and have legally changed my name to all lower case - david doyle.

Discussion

While doyle has made many excellent contributions to the world of social media with his research and thought provoking writing, this disingenuous attempt to justify his name change is LAME. doyle claims that capitalisation gives a name too much value given the world doesn’t revolve around "US". Yet, he goes out of his way to draw attention to himself by being the only person in the English speaking world to not capitalise his name or the first person pronoun “i”. That is, he is making “US” revolve around him by having to remember to write his name using different convention. Whenever we read his writing, we are forced to think about him and his "political stance". LAME...

The issue here is not the name change itself. By all means, have whatever name you want for yourself. Go crazy. Have your name changed to a symbol even. The issue is the supposed reason for the name change. david makes a LAME claim by constructing an artifice of an argument in order to rationalise his attention seeking act to himself and others. Without wishing to impugn his motives, his attempted ratiocination is contrived and hypocritical. It demonstrates his real motivation - deep down inside he wants to be special. David should be honest with us. He just wants everybody to look at him.

I am going to have my name legally changed to “THEO CLARK?”. Note that the all caps, question mark and quotations marks are also a part of my new name. Everyone will be required to shout my name (the all caps) and end it at a higher pitch than when they started saying it (the question mark). They will also be required to do the “air quote” gesture with their hands whenever they say my name.