Happy April

I thought we’d have some fun comparing our automatic understanding of words in the technological age we now live in with that of a world less than a generation ago.

Here are just twenty meanings of words twenty years ago, back in the latter half of the 1980s:

• An application was for employment
• A programme was a television show
• Spam was meat
• Windows were something you hated to clean
• A keyboard was part of a musical instrument
• When you clicked it meant you got on with someone
• A cursor used profanity
• A sand box was something your kids played in
• Memory was something you lost with age
• Navigation was the territory of trained pilots
• Compress was something you did to rubbish
• If you unzipped in public you went to jail
• Log on was adding wood to a fire
• A hard drive was a long trip on the road
• A mouse pad was where a mouse lived
• Post was something you got through your letter box
• A back up was something nasty that happened to your toilet
• You cut with scissors and pasted with glue
• A web was a spider’s home
• And a virus was the ‘flu

I shared these thoughts with some people and got the following additional gems:

Monitors were in class rooms
A mobile was used to amuse a baby
Wireless was something you listened to The Archers on
GUI was the consistency of syrup
Broadband was something John McEnroe wore
Excel was a verb
E was an additive
You practiced Latin in a forum

Please join in and share any extra ones with us that you come up with…

And, as we head towards another festive holiday, happy Easter to everyone.

It’s official!

We’ve been getting a bit heavy the last couple of weeks so I thought it’s time to lighten up a bit (oh no, another awful pun).

Seriously, though, haven’t you felt a bit lighter in step already over the last couple of days with the effect of daytime apparently being longer?

But did you know that it’s a hundred years since summer time was first mooted? For those of you who are interested, there’s some history on how summer time came about.

In six months’ time I’ll probably be miserable for a while when we change the clocks again, but for now, let’s enjoy all the natural daylight we can get!