(no subject)

I love all you Dallas people, but I am still violently allergic to your city.

Excuse me, we're looking for the porn

Lately, I have found myself using the term "porn" as shorthand for "the stuff that's good but no one can explain why", in any category of stuff you care to name. This originally came up at the office when I was explaining to my boss why support vector machines mean never having to say what your explicit criteria are; I used the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced" remark as an analogy, and concluded with, "So all we have to do is tell the system what's porn and what's not porn, and it'll go find the best porn for us." Conveniently(?), someone who hadn't listened to the rest of the conversation happened to walk by right as I said this, so now the joke going around the office is that I'm writing the world's most advanced porn search engine.

(Of course, it could be used to look for quality erotica, but it could be used to look for a lot of other things, too.)

And then just now in a conversation with shkspr13, I remarked, "Art is the pornography of writing," meaning that I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be art, but I know it when I see it. But "porn" is shorter.

It amuses me as shorthand. I hope it catches on.