Kwyjibo Sighting
Kwyjibo ('kwɪ•dʒi•boʊ) n. A big, dumb, balding North American ape.
The Kwyjibo does exist, and one of them likes ballet.
I sighted the same individual for the second time recently, again at a talk about a ballet. It's not big, but it is definitely balding, and this time it demonstrated a capacity for astonishing dumbness. I sat one row behind and one seat to the right of it, so I got a good look. What looked last time like a thin black pelt turned out, upon closer inspection, to be just clothes; if it does have a pelt, it's underneath them.
The speaker had mentioned that up until around 40 years ago, ballet companies wanted dancers with classical Greek bodily proportions – the waist bisecting the body so that the body was as long from waist down as from waist up – but since then they have preferred dancers with longer legs (but not too much longer, as an example demonstrated).
The Kwyjibo then asked if this longer-legs thing was because of some sort of "Darwinian selection," and/or was it because "breeding" of longer-legged dancers and/or people is going on? [The words in quotation marks are the Kwyjibo's; the 'and/or''s are mine, where it was unclear to me what the Kwyjibo was trying to express.] The speaker, happily, gave an unequivocal "no" answer, pointing out that the companies get hundreds if not thousands of applicants so they can pick and choose.
In retrospect that was probably a good strategy; if she'd smacked it down, even rhetorically, it might have taken fright, and that could jeopardize future opportunities for observation.
Hypothetically, a rhetorical smackdown would have resembled something like this:
The Kwyjibo does exist, and one of them likes ballet.
I sighted the same individual for the second time recently, again at a talk about a ballet. It's not big, but it is definitely balding, and this time it demonstrated a capacity for astonishing dumbness. I sat one row behind and one seat to the right of it, so I got a good look. What looked last time like a thin black pelt turned out, upon closer inspection, to be just clothes; if it does have a pelt, it's underneath them.
The speaker had mentioned that up until around 40 years ago, ballet companies wanted dancers with classical Greek bodily proportions – the waist bisecting the body so that the body was as long from waist down as from waist up – but since then they have preferred dancers with longer legs (but not too much longer, as an example demonstrated).
The Kwyjibo then asked if this longer-legs thing was because of some sort of "Darwinian selection," and/or was it because "breeding" of longer-legged dancers and/or people is going on? [The words in quotation marks are the Kwyjibo's; the 'and/or''s are mine, where it was unclear to me what the Kwyjibo was trying to express.] The speaker, happily, gave an unequivocal "no" answer, pointing out that the companies get hundreds if not thousands of applicants so they can pick and choose.
In retrospect that was probably a good strategy; if she'd smacked it down, even rhetorically, it might have taken fright, and that could jeopardize future opportunities for observation.
Hypothetically, a rhetorical smackdown would have resembled something like this:
OK, suppose we say that Europe and North America produce 90% of the world's ballet dancers. Between those continents we're talking a population of 1.1 billion, of which, at most, only a few thousand (let's say 5,000, which is 0.000005 per cent [or 5 ten-thousandths of one per cent] of that 1.1 billion) are ballet dancers. And you wonder whether there's been a breeding program especially for ballet companies over the last 40 years? Are you a ƒµ¢king idiot? Do you really think long-legged people are so rare that you need a breeding program to get 5,000 of them in a population of 1.1 billion? But supposing somebody decided to attempt it. How would such a thing even be organized? Don't you think you would have heard about it? I mean, jebus!
posted by Dr. Bubbles at 10:28
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