snow day brings new vocabulary

[zanzjan]

One of the plusses of working at a university is that if the university closes for a snow day, I get the day off paid. Which, since the elder child also had school canceled today, makes for a quiet day at home instead of having to find a way to slog through the nasty mess outside.

I did get a bit of extra sleep this morning, in bits and pieces around fussy babies, phone calls, and the furnace guys coming for the final service (still running, yay!) Somewhere in there I dreamed that I was reading a book and in it I came across a word I didn't know: discrepite. Yes, I woke up and remembered the imaginary word I didn't know, though sadly nothing else about the substance of whatever I was reading in my dream.

It occurred to me after I'd woken up that there was at least some small possibility it was a real word after all, or that it was sufficiently composed of real-word bits to be interpretable. I resolved that I would at some point in the next day or so ping mlp367, who is my favorite uber-word-geek, and get him to make a pronouncement on what the most logical possible meaning of my new word could be. However, I later dozed off again and in my dream solved my own problem: I was surprised to discover that discrepite was actually a noun, and that it was the word for a large robot whose job it was to carry around dead people.

Comments

[llcoolvad.livejournal.com]

You do realize that you've now become the world's authority on discrepite!

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGIH_enUS250US250&q=discrepite

Someone somewhere is now going to source you.

[stale-hermit.livejournal.com]

Good grief -- that's a story just waiting to happen.
Hurray for your subconscious!

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

http://metros.xanga.com/HMS_hp_Emily_Browning_rp?nextdate=6%2F12%2F2006+14%3A56%3A48.653&direction=n

[jeffsoesbe.livejournal.com]

a large robot whose job it was to carry around dead people

Hmmm ... very intrigued by that concept, I am. Hmmm....

- yeff

[zanzjan.livejournal.com]

It is interesting, isn't it? I got to thinking about it a fair bit after I woke up for good. If you had a futuristic society where most of the work and tedium of existence is handled by benign robots, I'd expect they'd also become in charge of sort of keeping track of all the people -- being free of any real work to do, odds are good they'd find a lot of ways to get themselves in trouble and/or go off "having adventures" -- and whenever someone actually managed to die (whether through natural causes or misadventure) they would suddenly become a discrepancy in the robots' people bookkeeping. Hence the robot who has to go find the body and resolve the numbers would be a discrepite.

[zanzjan.livejournal.com]

Of course then the next question is, would the discrepite go dispose of the body and revise the numbers downward, or would it carry around the person until they had crumbled to dust, trying to be a substitute for that person and continue his/her life as it was perceived they would have continued on their own if still alive? In many ways they'd become sort of a prosthetic device, carrying you around and being your life for you after you'd gone.

I wonder if the robots would understand that the person was dead, or just in need of an awful lot of assistance?

[jeffsoesbe.livejournal.com]

I like that "has to carry on the dead person's existence", almost like the robot is a puppet manipulating the person in their life. But why? Maybe if the person died "too soon" and thus would upset the order of the everyday life?

My first thoughts was the standard "post-plague" scenario with the robot as a body disposal unit because humans wouldn't do it. You've given this much more depth than I did!

- yeff

[zanzjan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's definitely taken on enough life as an idea to start making story happen. In my current take on it, the robots don't understand that being alive is an integral part of existence -- after all, they aren't alive and they continue to function -- so they are naively trying to "assist" these dead people to go on with their lives as if nothing has changed.

[jeffsoesbe.livejournal.com]

I like that direction on the concept! Could be very psychologically interesting...

Go for it!

- yeff