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December 30, 2008
Long photo, Joe-the-, tweet-up, crawl, flipper
What’s the word? According to a New York Times article , 2008 brought lots of new words, from politics, technology, and daily life.
For example, here are a few that relate to communication:
Did you know that a long photo is actually a video which lasts 90 seconds or less? The term was coined by the web site Flickr, which for the first time this year allowed people to post videos as well as photos.
And I’m sure you’re familiar with that symbol of an ordinary man, Joe the Plumber. In his spare time, he’s known as Joe Six-Pack, but in any case, “Joe” represents the everyman, not sophisticated, outside the boundaries of New York, Washington or LA—the real American.
Want to get together for a Tweet-Up? The term describes a meeting arranged through Twitter, the free nano-blogging service which helps small groups share what they’re thinking in a 140-character message called a Tweet.
The Times article offers lots of other interesting terms: nuke the fridge, naked short selling, pregorexia and skadoosh, but you can explore those for yourself.
Meanwhile, also according to the Times, there are more words in action at CNN, which invented the crawl, that annoying stream of news briefs that run along the bottom of cable news programs.
CNN has finally come to its senses and realized that the crawl is merely distracting, not illuminating. So it’s killed the crawl in favor of a new device called the flipper, a static line of text at the bottom of the screen that is tied to the story on air. (Sometimes the flipper shows headlines from other stories, but it doesn’t constantly move.)
Other cable news shows continue to use the crawl, but it’s not an effective device, according to Earl K. Miller, a professor of neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “A lot of times, when you think you’re multi=tasking, you’re just switching your attention between one or two or three things.”
Hope I helped you increase your word power.
Posted by Alison Davis at December 30, 2008 08:47 AM