Caring about or showing an interest in something is usually fine...showing an excessive interest in it is usually considered "weird," unless you're among a group of people who all share an interest in said thing. And "excessive" usually means "anything that might take effort to learn." So with poems, showing familarity and appreciation for them seems to be fine, but being able to recite them implies you're some poem-loving weirdo who sits there at night with volumes of poetry, committing them all to memory.
Yes, this is silly. But that's how it comes across to people.
Or at least, that is my understanding of things (I'm not the nest at picking up social cues either). I once got mocked as "Miss Walking Library" for the offence of knowing the constellations and the names of various major stars in the night sky (and I wasn't showing off, I was just trying to help someone who was actully trying to locate a certain constellation). Apparently such knowledge is "incredibly weird." 
My father once used the phrase "crossing the Rubicon" at his part-time job as zoning officer in a municipal office. None of the other officials responsible for running an actual town had any idea of the meaning or origin of the phrase. I think it's a cultural degeneration thing. When you read the Federalist Papers, and go through all the historical references that were used in a public argument, as if the precedents and parallels were considered to be common knowledge... To shame my students once who bitched about how hard it was to learn the offices of the Roman cursus honorum, I brought in a 3rd or 4th grade textbook from the 1950s which discussed those exact facts. Instead of being embarrassed at failing to master elementary school knowledge, they asked if we could use that textbook instead. When I expected them to learn the states and US Presidents, I was inured at that point to their complaints, only to find out that nearly every adult I encounter doesn't know those things either! I'm not even talking about specifics, like party affiliation or running mates, just listing the presidents in order. A freaking truck driver in Die Hard 3 knows that much.
I wonder if the easy availability of knowledge, such as being able to whip out a wireless device and Google any issue you'd care to has, rather than encourage people to learn even more, to bother learning even less, because they assume they can look it up whenever they want.
Nothing against them, but that's just too easy, as far as memorization goes.
“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.” GK Chesteron
Inde muagdhe Aes Sedai misain ye!
Deus Vult!
*MySmiley*
*NM*
- 25/07/2015 10:31:37 PM
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