And it TikTok anything but random? :)
TikTokers Confused on "Bucke List"
[Copy over from FB post I did randomly)
Although, I have an explanation: to most tik-tockers ... 2007 might as well be 1950 ha ha ... and it's actually a known literary technique too ... most of the best fictions arrive with their world having a feel of history built in but without specifics, just a "feel," a murky past, and that in turn has psychological roots that are explored a little in the first scene in Inception where Cobb talks with Ariadne and asks her to remember how they actually got to the cafe at which they're talking, which she can't because it's a constructed dream,but we want to fill in implied backstories .. but only implied; it's not so much about a group having a shared imagination/hallucination as it is about a human desire to enter our stories in a world already formed with some things whose stability as established things is evidenced precisely by our very inability to track them clearly. Even J.R.R. Tolkien uses it in Lord of the Rings. He had been working on the history of the lands in Middle Earth and Arda for decades before he wrote the LotR, so if Merry or Pippin encountered ruins back in some hills near Dunharrow, Tolkien surely knew whose ruins they were more than any other author who ever introduced any ruins in any fictional world they created, but instead he makes a point of saying how the origins of these cultic-type ruins had been lost to memory, nobody now remembering exactly who those people were.
And some histories are there that not many notice for things people want to assume have undergone etymologies that have been lost but really might not be (just as the 2004 book here evidences some prehistory the tiktokers have missed in pinning down the creation to the 2007 film). I have a book on my shelf on Cracker culture in central Florida, and before the term was a racial slur on all whites, it was less caustically used in our setting for poor tenant or squatting white farmers of Celt decent in central FLA, with a distinct cuisine that is probably the root of the name "Cracker Barrel," and a lifestyle fully on display in the 1946 film The Yearling with Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman; I have a book on my shelf on Cracker culture by a scholar at Florida State, with pictures of the 7 or 8 different known styles of cabins Crackers used, and one of those styles is sure to fit the cabin in The Yearling rather well ... and that book relates that the original use may well have been derogatory, as the first record is by an English king talking about a certain section of London being full of celt-descent "crackers" (my personal theory for that is based on years ago being told by a guy originally from Dublin that, if I was ever over there, the way to sound like a local is to ask "what's the crack?," only I found out someplace else that it's of Gaelic origin and originally spelled "craic" ... so the king's comment would be like if somebody around here noted how rednecks always say "'sup?" as short for "what's up?" and started calling them "suppers" ... and then of course, some might think it had something to do with the way they ate meals, just as some might think the present slur "cracker" has to do with the whiteness of saltine crackers, although there could be a connection in the other direction that somehow morphed with a tendency to onomatopoeia [words that sound like what they are, like "snap" and "crack" and "thump"; but it would have to be back a ways, as evidenced in the Goblin whip-cracking song in The Hobbit, but then Tolkien smoked a pipe and that supposedly comes from Native Americans ... cross-pollination and the history of words as organically evolving things is so funky]).
Some even play up the ambiguity even more intentionally noticeably for effect: In one scene in the Battle Star Gallactica reboot, Lee Adama tells president Rosalyn, "like my father always says, 'sometimes you gotta roll the hard 6,'" and when she asks, "I always wonder exactly what that phrase means," he replies "you know ... I don't really know.," giving the impression it's a phrase with no origin that's any longer known, maybe some type of dice-game chance thing lost to memory, but it actually has a very clear logic in the realm of the show, which is set in space, with fighter craft that operate in zero-G and no atmosphere (evidenced by one episode where Gallactica jumps into atmosphere to launch fighters and then jump out and is plummeting like a rock while she launches them), and thus do things alien to our aeronautics, which relies on pressure created by airflow at speed; we could never do a complete 180 degree turn on the same line, simply completely flipping in mid-air the way the show sometimes shows Viper fighter craft doing, and in military location description, 180 degrees is your six o'clock, hence all the action/war/solider jargon of "I got your six" = "I got your back," but even with the fastest turns we can do in our air-based flight, those 3 and 4 G turns push the blood out of the head (a cousin's husband flew in the first Gulf and told me when I was a kid about how, going into these turns, they would take a deep breath and hold it hard going into these high G turns to try to have the pressure keep the blood in the head and avoid "brown outs"), and in that zero-G world, the turns the ships can do can pull a Viper jocks foot off the pedal controls without extreme pressure, evidenced in once scene by Adama loading on weight on top of the leg sled in the gym on Starbuck's injured knee to show her she wasn't ready to go back in the cockpit, and hence, a complete 180 in a viper would be indeed a "hard six" done in a roll, a "rolling the hard six" ... but the writers did a beautiful job of showing how such understandable material origins get put into the murky past behind the incredibly interesting habit we humans have of using language to analogize, like saying "rolling the hard six" to speak of hard decisions, and then that can intersect with and mutate with completely other histories of the same word, like rolling a dice with numbers on it in games of chance (and, whatever else that show was about, it was about the texture of human experience ... and nothing evidences that texture more than the gymnastics with do with language and the stories we tell in it) ... so funky.
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