Wordorigins.org

The Oxford English Dictionary has 162 words with first citations from 1979. In that year, the world of entertainment brought us CDs, fluffers, karaoke, high concept, and improv; the Twinkie defense had its day in court; antiretroviral drugs and EpiPens were new medical advances; neo-cons squared off against New Agers; and high tech brought us SQL, email, and intranets.

The Oxford English Dictionary has 188 words with first citations from 1978. In that year, POSSLQs were joining in coupledom, perhaps using bustiers and crotchless panties when things got boring in the bedroom; kids took to BMX and hacky sack; if you wanted to overwhelm someone you could give them a gazillion bytes in an info-dump; and the Laffer curve started to become a political favorite of the right.

Mignon Fogarty (a. k. a. The Grammar Girl) makes an excellent point about being surprised by an e-book’s ending. But I wonder if the question is not “is it harder to write an e-book?” but rather “how does the format of the e-book alter the stylistic requirements?”

Storytelling techniques do depend on the medium. Storytelling in television or the movies is very different from that of the stage or the physical novel. It should be no surprise that e-books, the good ones at least, would be written differently than physical books. Of course, e-books and novels are a lot more similar than novels and television are, so the differences are likely to be more subtle, but they should still be there.

I have no profound insights here on the future direction of literature; I’m just musing on the idea that the new form will impose new storytelling techniques and structures. Also, it’s probably too early to tell what those changes would be anyway. E-books are too new, and there are likely to be radical changes in the way they are formatted as we discover how people best consume e-text.

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The Oxford English Dictionary has 240 words with first citations from 1977. In that year, white bread American men could drink brewskis, while their high-maintenance girlfriends sipped kir royales; one could dine on bibimbap in Koreatown; minifloppies made a brief appearance, while text messages were here to stay; and many considered the verb to incent a cringeworthy neologism.

The Oxford English Dictionary has 261 words with first citations from 1976. In that year, one could download data from an Ethernet; Ebola and retroviruses scared the pant off biologists; boomers took to Jazzercise and boogie boards; BAFTA and Bollywood began to compete with the American film industry; and memes became a meme.

The Oxford English Dictionary has 256 words with first citations from 1975. In that year, you could get a set-top box that played Betamax videotapes; Page Three girls were nobody’s idea of womyn; computer scientist brainiacs played with fractals, Phong shaders, and wetware; and CAT scans revolutionized medicine, while Reiki began to scam sick people.

Not a bad article, but it’s hardly news. The obsession with acronyms in the U. S. capital has been around for decades and decades.

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This blog post is a week old, but it’s not time sensitive.

While the particulars may be a bit different, this sounds like every single place I have ever worked. As to the degree requirement, with most jobs I’ve discovered that what a person majored in is completely irrelevant. If your studies prepped you with particular knowledge, that will be obsolete or forgotten in a few years anyway. What’s more important is the ability to think critically, to write well, and the ability to learn quickly as you do the job.

Tip o’ the hat to Erin McKean.

The Oxford English Dictionary has 222 words with first citations from 1974. In that year,we saw calls for slow food and Trumanesque politicians; banoffi pies and carpaccio were on the menu, but if you ate too fast the guys in the ambo could give you the Heimlich maneuver; people feared what the Moonies and Dungeons and Dragons were doing to the youth; and Sensurround and teletext hit the big and small screens.

The Oxford English Dictionary has 264 words with first citations from 1973. In that year, Derridean critics were deconstructing literature through intertextual readings; a lot of people were weirded out by est; members of the Symbionese Liberation Army and other cultic groups were deprogrammed; techies were playing with diskettes, Unix, grep, and FTPing; and linguists started talking about Ebonics.