Monthly Archives: May 2008

Savants, idiot and otherwise

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From the Seattle Times, on a 12-year-old austic artist:

In the past, Wil would have been called a “savant,” a term now considered insensitive. Dager calls him extraordinarily talented.

“Savant” is insensitive?  The more precise term I think of, and one that I can understand the dislike for, is “idiot savant“, where the juxtaposition of mental incapacities and shocking (savantish) talent is expressed explicitly. 

But savant by itself?  I’m wondering if this is me being out of touch with usage preferences and taboos in the autistic/special-needs/mental-health sector (possible), or there was some editing damage done to this article that reduced “idiot savant” to “savant” out of the same sensitivity that was then still being vestigially addressed in the paragraph.

Sounds like a research project.

Verbing Metafilter

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Metafilter is a website, but it’s also, judging by usage both on MeFi and off, a verb. But what does it mean?

Searching for “to metafilter” is asking for trouble; uses of ‘metafilter’ as a noun referring to the site itself dwarf verb-form uses, and “to metafilter” turns up lots of hits for, likewise, noun forms with to as prepositional glue (“subscribe to metafilter”, “strong connections to metafilter”, “POSTING ASCII ART TO METAFILTER”), dwarfing whatever infinitive “to Metafilter” cites might be out there.

Alternate tack, then: search for “metafiltering”. And this works pretty darned well, dishing up in total a few dozen uses of the phrase on mefi itself as well as some off-site usage (some related to the site, some not). It turns out that metafiltering can mean a few different things.

(Note: there are at least a couple other obvious suffix-based tactics which I have ignored for this writeup: “metafiltered” and “metafilterer”. Both turn up some interesting results, but I’ve found “metafiltering” to be the most engaging of the three; +ed and +er will have to wait for a separate writeup.)

So what sorts of things does “metafiltering” mean?

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