Dayger vs. Darty? Frosty the Snowman vs. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? Do long distance relationships ever really work?
These are some of the questions that my roommate and I have been putting up daily on the whiteboard we placed outside our door in the beginning of the semester. What started out as a complete joke, intended to settle our debate over what a day party is really called, has now turned into a daily case study. That may be exaggerating things a little bit, but the reactions to our polls have generated a ton of data for possible analysis.
The infamous first poll.
For example: Dayger vs. Darty. I personally have always referred to day parties as “daygers” and every one of my friends in high school did as well. My roommate on the other hand, thought that word was ridiculous (but seriously, what sounds like it’s more fun?) and told me that she’s only ever heard it called a “darty.” I put the whiteboard on my Snapchat story, just thinking that it was funny, and left the room without thinking about it. Throughout the day, I kept getting Snapchats from people I hadn’t talked to in months with their input, and when I came back to my dorm room that night, I saw our entire floor had voted. It turns out that what I had thought was just a simple difference of opinion between roommate and I was the result of geographic location. People from the South/West Coast prefer to say “dayger,” while the East Coast and Midwest go with “darty.” True to form, this generated a lot of arguing on our floor about which was better, and consequently why the North/South was better.
That was our first poll. Since then, we’ve changed it daily, and the level of response to it has grown immensely — to the extent that I have friends from Texas tell me they wait for it every day, and our floormates have had heated debates on it at 2 am outside our door. Some of the things we’ve asked, such as, “Does long distance ever really work?,” understandably get a lot of personal responses, but I’m always surprised when ones like, “Will eating 1 kg of chocolate make you gain 1 kg instantly?,” have caused people intense thought.
I think with elections having been so recently, that it’s interesting to see how invested people have become in this silly poll when voter apathy has been such a big problem in the world lately. People clearly want to have their opinions heard and maybe it’s the size of this poll that encourages them to vote because they can see their effect on the outcome. Or maybe people just feel really strongly about whether Christmas music can be played the morning after Halloween.
(side note: the correct answer is no, Thanksgiving deserves to be celebrated.)
What do you think? Do you call it dayger or darty? Which is worse, a walk of shame in a Halloween costume or a walk of shame in half the clothes you had the night before? Are the reactions to the daily poll because people feel strongly about the topics, or because the act of voting and being able to see your vote count is actually a motivator?
Who knows, maybe that’ll be our next question.
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