My Idiosyncratic Preoccupations

Things I secretly think about far too often that most other people do not. This page will likely include many citations to Wikipedia, the font from which many of these preoccupations arise.

• The normalization increasing popularity of British expressions in written American English, particularly when they are assumed to provide a veneer of sophistication that they do not provide in British English.
• The increasing misuse of "normalization" to mean that something is, or should be, increasingly perceived as normal, when it really refers to adjusting extreme values towards an existing norm.
• The rise and fall of the liverwurst sandwich, particularly as a folk cure for insomnia, as it appears in exactly two places of which I am aware, the book "A Wrinkle in Time" and the movie "White Christmas."
• Culturally specific medical conditions, or culture-bound syndromes (e.g. ataque de nervios) and more broadly medical conditions about which there is no agreed-upon definition, such as "nervous breakdown," as well as the specific question of what ailment the New York Dolls were describing in the song "Personality Crisis," a term used almost nowhere else, as opposed to "identity crisis," which does not seem to match the condition described in the song.
• Legendary animals invented for the purpose of playing pranks, such as the drop bear and the Sidehill gouger (see fearsome critters more broadly).
• Folk legal beliefs in the United States, including the following, all of which I have heard from multiple sources:
  • If you receive enough continuances for a hearing on a motor vehicle citation, eventually the officer who cited you will fail to show up for court and the citation will be dismissed.
  • Employers in a "right-to-work state" can dismiss employees for any reason at all, a premise similar to the doctrine of at-will employment if it were unconstrained by state and federal employment law. In fact, a "right-to-work state" is one in which unions are prohibited from compelling non-union employees to pay legal dues.
  • An illegal "hostile workplace environment" is one where employees frequently experience hostility.
  • Any disclosure or transfer of medical information or records without patient permission is a "HIPAA violation."
• The subsequent career trajectories and income streams of rappers better known for free mixtapes than studio albums, as well as streaming-era viral one-hit wonders such as Sheck Wes, Desiigner, Dej Loaf and Young MA.

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