It's interesting, isn't it, how those "chestnuts" survive, and each generation thinks they may have come up with it new? (Thinking again of "semper ubi sub ubi"). It's kind of Peter and Iona Opie territory, thinking about how those things get transmitted, especially to "islands" like my prep school (where, in order to have contact with other Latin students, the students would have had to have had older brothers or sister, or learned it from older students....the phrase got there somehow, unless it had been there since the days Latin was widely taught, and just passed down from senior to frosh in a long chain...)

Heh. Cultural transmission as Island Biogeography. This promises to become too geeky on too many levels even for me. (I'm fascinated by both island biogeography/dispersal and linguistics, and evolution, so I tend to make a big mash-up of all three sometimes and speculate on how things - like the silly joke-phrases people use, and things like traditional knitting motifs - got to be where they are.)

Of course, the Internet kind of changes things - it's as if in older times, those kinds of cultural transmission had to come through a sort of "selective breeding" like traditional agriculture, and now here's the Internet, which is almost like genetic engineering is to traditional agriculture - things can change a lot faster, and maybe that change is more "directed" (in the sense of, you can grab a gene you want and stick it in the organism you want, instead of waiting for the desired mutation to maybe occur.)

So instead of eight-pointed stars slowly being passed along trade routes from the Middle East into Scandinavia, and then being carried by Vikings to the British Isles, you have an intarsia chart of Hello Kitty blipping around cyberspace in a second.

And you know? I'm conflicted about that. The romantic in me prefers the old, trade-route method, and wonders what happens to human creativity in a world where you can turn on the 'Net and find many of the ideas you were having already executed. (There have been several times where I was contemplating using a particular stitch pattern to make something, and then there it shows up on Knitty or somewhere and I feel like....I don't know, I feel like, "That could have been me!" and like "Well, there's no point in my trying to come up with anything new because someone else somewhere will already have done it." I admit I've even been leery of posting patterns I wrote lest someone come back at me and say, "You stole that from me!" and provide a link to a pattern they have been selling, where what we did was essentially a form of convergent evolution, where I came up with the same idea and developed it without ever having seen the pattern.)

But then again - it is kind of nice to have all that input, to see what so many people are doing.

(Another non-connected thought: It seems to me with the rise of Ravelry there are fewer new free patterns out there; it seems a lot of folk on Ravelry have twigged to the notion that they can put up an Etsy shop and make $3 or $5 or more off of patterns they might have given away before. Not that I'm opposed to that, but...again, if a person independently comes up with a sock pattern that uses the same or a similar stitch pattern to one that someone's selling, I hate to see the "cease and desist" letters come out. I guess what frustrates me is it's tiring to do the "has anyone come up with this already?" search for patterns, just like I do when doing research.)