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.