{"id":277,"date":"2006-09-02T13:34:11","date_gmt":"2006-09-02T02:34:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2006\/09\/02\/xenozoologophobia\/"},"modified":"2006-09-02T13:34:11","modified_gmt":"2006-09-02T02:34:11","slug":"xenozoologophobia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2006\/09\/02\/xenozoologophobia\/","title":{"rendered":"Xenozoologophobia"},"content":{"rendered":"

While deciding how to introduce the zipper<\/a> story, I came to learn some rather unsavoury truths about myself and my culture.<\/p>\n

Firstly, how come I know (and I am confident that you know) the word “Venusian” means for someone for Venus, when I don’t know the word for, say, someone from Cairo. <\/p>\n

Cairo, and its suburbs, has 16 million real, live people, and I don’t know if they are called “Cairoers”, “Cairoans” or “Cairoites”. Venus has no people, and I know that if I saw someone called them “Venusers”, I would shake my head.<\/p>\n

Does that illustrate how the vivid imagination of science fiction writers has influenced our culture? Our does it illustrate the lack<\/em> of vivid imagination of science fiction writers, who all use the same word for the same cliched concept?<\/p>\n

Secondly, when I compare the mental associations I have with the word “Martian” to the word “Venusian”, I can see some differences.<\/p>\n

While Martians are certainly culturally alien, they still have understandable motives. Venusians are more likely to be incomprehensibly alien. Martians are more likely to live among us, peacefully and\/or undetected. I don’t know if they count their influences as the Romans, H.G. Wells or Marvin, but Martians far more likely to declare war on the Earth than Venusians.<\/p>\n

My conclusion is that I am already stereotyping the behaviour of… not just races or even species, but entire mythical kingdoms<\/a>! … and I have never even met one.<\/p>\n

For shame, Julian! For shame!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While deciding how to introduce the zipper<\/a> story, I came to learn some rather unsavoury truths about myself and my culture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[31,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek","category-observation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}