Archive for the ‘This N That’ Category
By Ros Krasny
BOSTON (Reuters) — This story might be epic, and could even go viral, but not if Lake Superior State University has anything to do with it. Just sayin’.
The small college in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, released its annual list of “banished words” — terms so overused, misused and hackneyed they deserve to be sent to a permanent linguistic trash can in the year ahead.
“Viral,” often used to describe the rapid spreading of videos or other content over the Internet, leads the list for 2011.
“This linguistic disease of a term must be quarantined,” Kuahmel Allah of Los Angeles said in making a nomination.
Runners-up included “epic” and “fail,” often twinned to describe a blunder of monumental proportions.
A total of 14 words were on the list. Read the rest of this entry »
The last 10 years have brought us a windfall of new gadgets and gizmos, and with them, a new way of life.
Since 2000, we’ve gained iPods and iPads, Travelocity and Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare, BlackBerry smartphones and Android devices, Xboxes and Wiis, among many other new services, sites, and electronics. We’re now poking, tweeting, Googling, and Skyping.
But in that time we’ve also changed our habits and lost a few things, too. As we look forward to 2011, let’s take a look back at the things that have become obsolete. What other items or practices would you add to the list? Read the rest of this entry »
Born when Ross Perot was warning about a giant sucking sound and Bill Clinton was apologizing for pain in his marriage, members of this fall’s entering college class of 2014 have emerged as a post-email generation for whom the digital world is routine and technology is just too slow.
The college class of 2014 has never found Korean-made cars unusual on the Interstate, and 500 cable channels, of which they will watch a handful, have always been the norm. Since “digital” has always been in the cultural DNA, they’ve never written in cursive, and with cell phones to tell them the time, there is no need for a wristwatch. Dirty Harry (who’s that?) is to them a great Hollywood director. The America they have inherited is one of soaring American trade and budget deficits; Russia has presumably never aimed nukes at the United States and China has always posed an economic threat.
Nonetheless, they plan to enjoy college. The males among them are likely to be a minority. They will be armed with iPhones and BlackBerries, on which making a phone call will be only one of many, many functions they will perform. They will now be awash with a computerized technology that will not distinguish information and knowledge. So it will be up to their professors to help them. A generation accustomed to instant access will need to acquire the patience of scholarship. They will discover how to research information in books and journals and not just on-line. Their professors, who might be tempted to think that they are hip enough and therefore ready and relevant to teach the new generation, might remember that Kurt Cobain is now on the classic oldies station. The college class of 2014 reminds us, once again, that a generation comes and goes in the blink of our eyes, which are, like the rest of us, getting older and older.
Most students entering college for the first time this fall — the Class of 2014 — were born in 1992. For these students, Benny Hill, Sam Kinison, Sam Walton, Bert Parks and Tony Perkins have always been dead. In addition …
1. Few in the class know how to write in cursive.
2. Email is just too slow, and they seldom, if ever, use snail mail.
3. “Go West, Young College Grad” has always implied “and don’t stop until you get to Asia … and learn Chinese along the way.”
4. Al Gore has always been animated.
5. Los Angelenos have always been trying to get along.
6. Buffy has always been meeting her obligations to hunt down Lothos and the other blood-suckers at Hemery High.
7. “Caramel macchiato” and “venti half-caf vanilla latte” have always been street corner lingo.
8. With increasing numbers of ramps, Braille signs and handicapped parking spaces, the world has always been trying harder to accommodate people with disabilities.
9. Had it remained operational, the villainous computer HAL could be their college classmate this fall, but they have a better chance of running into Miley Cyrus’s folks on Parents’ Weekend.
