Excerpt from a Conversation

[gnomi]

And now, another entry in the category of "ahhh...now things about gnomi make much more sense":

A snippet of conversation with my mother:

Me: So, I'm looking at flights to Norfolk, VA.

Ima: You should look into Southwest, see if their prices are good.

Me: Yeah, but they only fly out of [TF] Green and... uh... Purple*.

Ima (without a beat): Right. You know, they're starting a shuttle to Purple, so it's easier to get to.


*Purple, in this case, is Manchester, NH, which is no closer distance-wise to my parents than Logan but is closer to them in terms of actual travel time. Since beckyfeld is within commuter-train distance of BWI, Ima frequently goes Southwest from Manchester to BWI.

Comments

[csbermack.livejournal.com]

So is Purple a general metasyntactic variable, or does it only replace nouns?

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

Actually, Purple is the variable that represents the opposite of Green (http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/countries/us/guide/025.html).

[csbermack.livejournal.com]

And the sad thing is I still didn't get it, even after clicking the link, until I read the rest of this thread and went back and studied the post.

Aaaah, mornings.

[kuroshii.livejournal.com]

don't feel bad. here in chicago, i have no "real" reason to know that Green was an actual airport name and not some funky code to start with. so i just went through the same process you did. :)

[angwantibo.livejournal.com]

Shouldn't that be red?

[kuroshii.livejournal.com]

only if your brain is wired more strongly for "color wheels" than for "scifi." ;)

[42itous.livejournal.com]

Your mother is Officially Cool now.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

I will let her know. :-)

(my mother has been Officially Cool for a while in many people's books.)

[terri-osborne.livejournal.com]

So, is it wrong that my first thoughts were about the endless battles that must take place between them, because I went straight to the Green and Purple Drazi from B5?

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

Exactly! I was thinking Drazi when I pulled "Purple" as the name of the airport I was blanking on.

[lisafeld.livejournal.com]

Me, too!

[madfilkentist]

I predicted in my own mind that there would be a Drazi joke within the first three comments (chronologically). It missed by one minute.

[violetcheetah.livejournal.com]

i have friends who use the word 'noun' to replace whatever noun they can't think of. for some reason, i use purple to indicate that something is particularly spiffy. i believe your husband was around, and possibly playing, when i got a bridge hand many years ago (during the brief period when i played bridge), and it was really good, and i exclaimed 'purple!' my partner said, 'i'll interpret that as three-no-trump.'