lost literary guideposts

To add to my post on lost sonic guideposts, here’s an article on the evolution of language, albeit written in a tongue-in-cheek manner.

“ Remember when a “website” could only be found in a dusty corner of your basement? When the only thing you would “bookmark” was the latest novel, and “rebooting” meant putting your galoshes back on?”– Jim Stallard

Like Pogue, Stallard muses about the use of vocabulary today, that often differs from the original meaning of these words. Cookies no longer mean just that – with the Internet, cookies take on a whole different (more sinister?) meaning. Ditto for ‘bookmarks’.

‘Zip drives’, ‘spam filter’ (spam was named for spam canned meat?) and a whole lot of other innocuous words strung together to make new meaning for the internet era. ‘Googling’ has already made it into the dictionary, both noun and verb. Stephen Colbert’s ‘truthiness‘ is slowly becoming an official part of the English vocab. And of course, ‘Blogging’ is now a verb, noun AND adjective.

With an evolving vocab, perhaps it’s time to revise our nursery rhymes too, as Stallard suggests. Although i’m not sure kids in the future will still go to the playground.