Two Things

When I was 21 I worked at a Subaru plant here in Indiana as a translator. There was a woman who worked there named Deb. In Japanese, you can't end a word in a consonant unless that consonant happens to be "n." So all the Japanese guys who worked there would pronounce her name "Debu" but the problem with that was that "debu" in Japanese means someone who is a fatty. This wouldn't be such a problem had she been totally thin, but she was not. On the other side of the coin, there was a Japanese man who worked there whose last name was Yoda, and try as we did, it was hard to really draw any Yoda-like correlations between his personal appearance/demeanor and the Star Wars character of the same name.

I would like to coin a phrase or an effect. Like the domino effect, but have it be my own. The Dixon effect.* Here's an effect I've noticed, and I don't think it has a name yet.

It's what happens when something seems like a really big deal, but in reality, it only seemed that way because a small group of people were especially vocal about it. For example, this seems to happen on the internet a lot, especially when people are allowed to comment or voice their opinion freely with relatively high visibility. People will talk about how they can't wait for such and such a thing to hit the market, and it seems like there's a lot of buzz, but it's actually just the buzz of a few particularly vocal individuals who do not represent the market as a whole. Kind of like the guy who got a Zune tattoo. Maybe it could be called the Fanboy Hype Distortion Bubble Effect. I'm bad at this naming thing.


* Horrible band name. You saw it here first.