How to Recognize a Library Science Student II: Attack of the Clones

Well, your friendly neighborhood library science student is back, with another list of ways to identify library science students outside their natural habitat (this, of course, being the library or class). Enjoy, but use these with caution. Taken individually, they might (for the most part) apply simply to extremely nerdy people. So, just because you hear people laughing about LARPing does not mean that you should go ask them how library school is. You have been warned.

5) LARPing becomes a euphemism.
Somehow, during a conversation at my apartment, the topic of LARPing (Live Action Role Playing) came up. Well, I guess we decided that LARP sounded much more inappropriate than it actually is, so for the rest of the evening, sentences like "A whole group of people LARPed all over campus when I was in undergrad" became hysterically funny.

6) Their first reaction on seeing a book is "how would I catalog/index this?"
I have heard tell that a fellow student of mine, upon picking up a copy of the Bible, in a church, while waiting for a wedding to start, began to wonder how he would catalog it. I also must confess that, since starting my Indexing class, I have taken to looking at my non-fiction collection and wondering what the forms of knowledge and topics are. What this obviously means is that library science school gets into your head and slowly starts to warp your worldview. And once that's happened, you can never go back.

7) When they come across a disturbing passage in an old book about parents fondling their children, their reaction is to wonder if the word meant something different back then.
I had sent a friend of mine an Awful Library Books post about a book on marriage from 1953, and naturally he went and found the full text online. While perusing this book, he came across a sentence about how teenagers aren't ready for the "caresses of marriage" but are too old to be fondled by their parents. He shared this with me and after being profoundly disturbed, his next reaction was to wonder if fondle meant something different back then. Well, I ended up pulling out my dictionary and finding the following definition, labeled as obsolete: "To treat with indulgence and solicitude; pamper." That made us feel better. Slightly. Because that definition still doesn't seem to work in context. But, hey, we tried.

8) They will find the line "It's like Boolean logic!" extremely funny.
While watching the final of the World Cup, a group of us began an ill-fated conversation that I choose not to recount because I enjoy my sanity. I will say that it was about two things such that A is always a kind of B, but B is not always a kind of A. As I said to them, it's like squares and rectangles. Well, one of my companions carried it further by replying that it's like Boolean logic. And then we all laughed hysterically. So, actually, I guess that story is just a whole bunch of nerd-tastic moments rolled into one.

If anyone has any other methods of identification from their own personal experience, please don't hesitate to share!