Self Portrait but not Selfie
I caught sight of my hand in the helicopter window when I flew up the Toba River valley a few weeks ago. I had no idea what I was going to do with this shot, nor even why I took it. In fact, I thought it would be no use at all since it makes my hand seem wrinklier than I usually see it, and implies that perhaps the rest of me is this wrinkled and old-looking too, giving the wrong impression totally to those of my readers that don’t know what I look like (and those that do, no smart-ass comments). However, please note that I am not so feeble as to be unable to heft a Canon 5Dii with one hand and hold it steady enough to take a picture. Besides, there is a double reflection and that is doubling the number of wrinkles – simple math really. Right?
So, what prompted me to post this revealing picture? I was reading that the Oxford Dictionary has declared “selfie” to be the new word of the year. The phrase “old-fashioned” might spring to mind, supported visually by this picture (old x2), but I am having a hard time accepting selfie into my lexicon. Self portrait is so much more my kind of phrasing.
Maybe one day selfie will spring naturally to my lips, without self-conscious thoughts of trying to be a young hipster, or whatever the word is these days. About as likely as one day taking a (sober) look at the end of my arm and finding the rugged strong young man’s hand currently missing in action.
I note that this blog is very much ahead of the curve (take that!, Oxford English Dictionary). The word selfie first appeared on these pages on 12/12/12 – in a comment posted by one of you I hasten to add.
And, if you want to see other self portraits (very rare) on this blog, then click on the tag at the bottom of this post.
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Canon EOS 5D MkII, Canon 50mm/f1.4 lens, ISO100, f4, 1/1000th.
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burnt embers 
I really like this selfie!
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Thanks so much David. I like it too. I think it says a few things, some of them are lies of course, but that is good too.
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Helicopters – see what they can do to you……… my hand looked like that when I first got off a Bell Huey years ago 🙂
David.
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That would explain it!
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🙂
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The double dose of wrinkles is not kind to you, but good for the image (the picture, I mean, not YOUR ‘Image’). It’s always interesting looking out of a window, not always for what you see out there, but for what you see reflected, or a bizarre combination of the two. I like this – wrinkles and all!
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Thanks Andy. I am glad people like this. It sure caught my eye and demanded I take a picture. It was so different than the view out the window!
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Excellent !
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Hi Marcel – and thanks!
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For a minute I thought it was a photo of my hand, without the turbulence. Really, it’s the wrinkles that make this interesting. Very interesting.
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Thanks Ken. Wrinkles are interesting. I find them on other people more interesting than on me – like this guy http://wp.me/p1jJt8-17Y.
Maybe you were there in spirit and I can blame the wrinkles on you. I suspect you would have enjoyed the flight, and the location.
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The guy in that first photo looks just like me, only less wrinkled! I would have loved the flight and the location as well.
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In addition to the refection’s doubling the number of wrinkles, the air turbulence from the rotors and your elevation also played a role. I am sure that once you were back on the ground and away from reflections and rotors, those pesky wrinkles vanished.
I like this shot – it’s unusual. I like unusual.
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Thank you Melinda. You guessed it right away. Flying, and in helicopters especially, makes me appear wrinkly. Normally, I am not. Unusual as that might seem for a guy of my age.
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Personally I would call such selfies that have gained the title of word of the year as Narcissistic-Duckfaces. Selfie is obviously part of the evolution of the English language, but as quickly as a word enters the dictionary though common usage they are quickly withdrawn because they fall out of common use. We can only wait a few years for it to leave our conciousness. Who remembers what a hobbledehoy is anyway.
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Hi Ben, nice to hear from you. Social media are spawning all kinds of new words. I fear that some will take a very long time to leave us, but with luck they will cycle through far more quickly than they used to. As to hobbledehoy, I had to look it up, but when asked my wife could remember – that’s 50% of my sample, for whatever that is worth. Looking it up finds that there are various businesses and even musicians taking hobbledehoy as a name – one has to wonder if they know what it means.
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I remembered it because I had a word a day calendar and it was one of the words. I think of social media terms as fashion trends. Some people try to change words meanings by using them but in the end Hobbledehoy will always be a Gawky Youth.
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I don’t think we can be sure that any word will retain its meaning over the longer term – words get hijacked, repurposed and misused into new meanings all the time. My dictionaries have multiple meanings for many words, with some being deemed archaic, or similar dismissal as no longer current.
As to remembering the meaning of hobbledehoy, my wife subscribes to wordsmith’s A Word A Day, and I would not be surprised if that is what defined the meaning for her. Thank goodness there are people that care about words and their meanings, including the archaic and otherwise out of fashion ones!
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Ha! I just looked at the wordsmith site archives and found that Hobbledehoy went by just a few months ago, in June 🙂
http://wordsmith.org/words/hobbledehoy.html
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