As a former museum employee I now feel safe in unleashing to the world these definitions based in my experience in the museum community. We are all guilty of some of these. Hopefully you will all be slightly offended by some of them. Enjoy. Feel free to pass along to anyone who won't prevent me from being hired after grad school.
1. Historian – People who think they would have been real cool 400 years ago who if they traveled back in time would be made fun of by the great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents of the cool people today.
2. Artifacts – things museum educators say you should touch, curators say you should never touch, and development officers say you can touch…if the price is right.
3. Orientation Videos – Spielberg-esque Cliff Notes of facts visitors didn’t pay attention to in high school in the vain hope that they will ask good questions.
4. Visitor – An unenlightened intruder who thinks their $15 admission fee entitles them to interrupt conversations about one’s favorite 15th century field piece. Armed with cameras instead of muskets, these “aliens” are unable to initiate proper “first person” try as they may. Found of such greetings as “Ahoy matey” and “Howdy” instead of the period “correct” “good morrow kind sir” and “good day gentle lass”.
5. Cool Visitor – A rare species of the general public who may or may not be “cooler” than the regular visitor who happens to ask about an museum employees’ pet topic. Referenced many days/months, even years after the fact to win interpretive arguments about a pet account.
6. Board members – People who truly patronize museums because the more glamorous causes were already taken.
7. Volunteers – People too poor/unimportant to be board members.
8. Marketers – People who got “C’s” in the same subjects that their educator brethren mastered but get paid twice as much to do. Expert coiners of phrases such as “edutainment” and “history is fun” that are mutually exclusive.
9. Management – People who tell their employees how to do things they don’t know how to do. Like the phrase “those that can not do…teach”…those that cannot teach manage.
10. Director – Those that cannot manage…direct.
11. Security – Museum employees whose interest in militaria is thoroughly an unapologetically modern. Fans of “Solder of Fortune” and Michael Chiklis television dramas whose job is to ensure that people don’t steal things they wouldn’t possibly wish to steal.
12. Tour Guides – A breed of museum employee who takes sadistic pleasure in keeping people out in the sun/rain for over two hours. These nerdy survivalists either can’t fathom that they are boring or are trying to ensure a lack of enthusiasm for history in future generations for job security.
13. House Docents –Elitist tour guides, docents are people who are experts on all of the “period” décor that would not have actually been in the room at the time.
14. Reenactors – people who complain about the historical inaccuracies in a movie except for the 5 minutes his/her elbow is in the film
15. Interpreters – an elitist “mercenary” of the reenacting world. People who get paid to do what their brethren in the hobby would do for free (only because those people are too weird to be hired).
16. Interpretation – The art of telling people more than they would ever wish to know about a given subject. Not known to occur between 4:50-5:00 PM.
17. Accounts – Obscure primary sources that interpreters/educators/tour guides reference during mini dissertations with the public used to justify the wearing of anachronistic clothing/ period activity/story telling that makes one look cooler than their coworkers.
18. First Person – The art of being able to authentically talk like people who would have gotten their ass kicked 300 years ago.
19. Third Person – The art of being able to authentically talk like people who get their ass kicked in the present day.
20. Costumes – Things museum people wear. The more people try to make them look less dorky, the dorkier they make people look.
21. Retro-sexual – A straight male interpreter, who ironically is shabbily dressed when off-duty, whose costumed sartorial dash and non-stop on-duty banter about period buttons and concerns over a tunic making his “butt look too big” sounds “really gay” to the unenlightened.
22. Period Mack – A conversation initiated by a male living historian who is hitting on a female living historian or “reenactress”…usually the most attractive “reeactress” on site. Whether this person is attractive in “real life” is irrelevant. Conversations are peppered with accounts about period buttons and invitations to period balls. Used to justify a living historian isn’t too “retro-sexual”.
23. Hostage Taking – The art of talking about a piece of fence/hard tack/weapon for over ten minutes. This form of education is a clever way to ensure coworkers will never receive the glory of talking to a “cool visitor”.
24. Inquisition – A higher form of hostage taking where the speaker seemingly “converts” the visitor to his/her pet account or dissertation. In reality the hostage agrees with the points merely to get away.
25. Misfire – An event that inevitably occurs during a gun demonstration when one has kept tourists out in the sun/rain/wind/hail/snow too long. Scientifically known as a “projectile dysfunction” and just as embarrassing as that name implies.
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Originally Posted by BirdBrain
