Shaped by the world, certainly. But not determined.

Yesterday I enjoyed a pleasant lunch with delightful conversation.  Four individuals who have known one another for all or most of their lives.  All intelligent, quick-witted, widely read, well educated.  All in positions where they interact with many people across class, culture and geography.  

At one point in the conversation, I make a joke riffing off of the old saying "teaching grandmother to suck eggs."  Instead of laughter, I see blank faces.  They all claim to have never heard the expression.  

As bright as they are and widely read and broadly conversant, I am quite confident that they have heard or read the phrase but it is also quite apparent that for none of them had it ever really registered.

It is possible that they might have recognized the phrase had I mentioned it before making the joke.  But that seems a remote possibility.  I have to accept the fact that it simply was not in their repertoire.  Despite my near certainty that it would be.

I suspect most people are accustomed to flexing or constraining their vocabulary according to their audience.  Being somewhat uncomfortably accustomed to making presentations to highly disparate groups in my career, I broadly think of four different audiences.  Group one, by far the largest, is your random individual who is likely to have graduated high school but not more.  Then there are the college graduates.  Then there is the audience of people typically from the top half of the 50-100 best universities in the nation.  Finally there are those with permanently curious and questing minds.  

For the latter, whatever language you use, there is no danger.  You can use obscure Latin quotes and not put them off.  Even if it is unfamiliar to them. they will want to know.

There are various measurement systems out there, such as Lexiles, which attempt to measure either the complexity of vocabulary used or the complexity of the language used (taking into account syntax, form and structure.)  

Mass market communication is usually written at a fifth grade level.  Newspapers are 8th-11th grade.  Serious magazines are 12th grade to college.  

I commented on the issue of language complexity measurement and trends back in 2014, When progress doesn't at first seem like progress.

But we aren't talking about language complexity here.  We are talking more about breadth of allusive knowledge.  Everyone can't know all allusions or references to cultural phrasing.  But how might we measure that?

I thought all three of my audience would know about not teaching grandmother to suck eggs.  It is a reference to trying to instruct someone in something in which they are either already experienced or instructing them on a topic about which they know more than you.  It comes in many permutations such as "you're teaching him to suck eggs" or "Don't teach me to suck eggs."

Supposedly the origin is from the 19th century and earlier.  Old people, without teeth, would of course sustain themselves on soft foods such as eggs.  It would be presumptuous of a young person to try and teach an old person how to suck eggs, given that they were already accustomed to doing so.  

What other phrases might be comparable?  I came up with five:

Teaching grandmother to suck eggs

The grass is greener on the other side of the fence

A bird in hand is worth two in the bush

The squeaky wheel gets the grease

Make hay while the sun shines

All of them are proverbs which encapsulate somewhat complex ideas in a simple sensory fashion.  I would have guessed all to be comparably familiar to the upper two audiences mentioned above and really, to any college educated audience.  Forced to rank them by familiarity within the population, I would have guessed:

The grass is greener on the other side of the fence

A bird in hand is worth two in the bush

The squeaky wheel gets the grease

Make hay while the sun shines

Teaching grandmother to suck eggs

Purely a guesstimate.  No empirical basis for the ranking.

How close am I?  Well . . . 

They fall into three clusters.  Apparently 

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush

Make hay while the sun shines

are the most commonly used, and therefore, presumably, the most recognized.

Then there is a middle phrase, distinctly less used than "A bird in the hand . . ."

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence

The final pair, also in close order, and again markedly less frequently used than the middle one.

Teaching grandmother to suck eggs 

 

The squeaky wheel gets the grease

Playing around with the phrases indicates that NGRAM viewer is reasonably sensitive to the exact wording.  You are limited to five words in a phrase and some limit on characters or words in the whole search string.  I included as much of the distinct gist within the five word limit.  Still, there is phrasing variability.

The graphed result is:

Click to enlarge.

I am marginally surprised at the ordering.  There is evidence to support why I would have expected my conversational partners to recognize the phrase.  Indeed, I would have been willing to bet that "the squeaky wheel" would be materially better recognized than "Teach grandmother." 

 

All this is interesting (to me), but relatively inconsequential.

Other than that it reinforces something both consequential and fundamental.  We are all individuals.  No matter how comparable in how many respects, we are all different and all equally capable of surprising one another by what we know as well as by what we don't know.

It is deceptively easy to fall into a mechanistic view of the world, a deterministic view which allows for no free will.  While probabilistic scenarios and forecasting do get us a reasonable distance, that is not real forecasting.  Too many scenarios and too many branches.  To be able to accurately forecast complex systems which are dynamic, loosely coupled, evolving and chaotic, the system has to be the computer.  No computer outside the system can forecast it.  

Which brings us back to the fundamental.  We are all individuals.  Shaped by the world certainly.  But not determined.