[An old mail I forgot to send back in January, but it strikes me as
worth mentioning]
On 04/01/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Of course,
there's [[Eddie the Eagle]] (to keep with the E theme) who
not only didn't do anything to qualify, but made them put in the rule
that you had to actually have some previous success to become an
Olympian ;-)
Being so bad they had to make a rule to get rid of you sounds very
notable to me.
Indeed :-)
Though now I think about it, it does show up an interesting bias in
our assumptions. Today, Olympians are de-facto notable, by definition
world-class athletes. But thirty-forty years ago - certainly back by
the 1920s - in many respects, in some of the more obscure sports, they
were "the chaps from --- who turned up". We often assert a kind of
retroactive assumption that that the standards of notability inherent
in something in the present were inherent in its past incarnations,
and use the present "status" as a blanket acceptance criteria.
An example that springs to mind is the Victoria Cross, where we have a
reasonably established assumption that winners of it are inherently
notable, because of the scarcity of the award and the cultural
importance attatched to it. But this is a modern thing, a product of
the past century; the VC was originally (by contemporary standards)
given out remarkably often - in one case in 1857, 24 in a single day.
18 of those were awarded by ballot, given to a unit and then selected
from among their members - do we class those recipients as "notable"
in the same way as someone who won it by more stringent standards a
century later?
I don't think these small unintentional broadenings of what
constitutes notability are a detrimental thing to any "notability
rule" - it does, after all, mean we have a larger body of topics to
draw on without bickering - but it is something we should perhaps be
aware that we do.
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk