#41 Nerbs and Vouns

We live in the age of the computer. Whoever hasn’t gotten online by now probably never will. And for the most part, once the original zeal wears down for wasting endless hours surfing the internet and washing up on the various rocks of spam, porn, and home business opportunities, the computer is a great way to ply the seas of information. But there are some word-related things regarding computers and there microchip offshoots that have cropped up since Bill Gates first invented DOS. Seems like we’re constantly having to reinvent language to accommodate the new technologies.
Like the terms push, press, and strike. I completely wore out my first keyboard because all those computer instructions said, “strike any key when ready.” A “strike” to me is a sharp blow. We haven’t had to strike keys since the days of the manual Underwood. And “Push” doesn’t seem to get the action over quickly enough. If you push an “X” key you’ll have a page full of X’s before you know it. “Press” is probably the most accurate word but, let’s face it, it sounds a little wimpy.
Same with our other new tool of the apocalypse, the cellphone. Saying we’re “dialing” someone’s number is completely disengaged from today’s reality. My 14-year-old asked me why we say “dial a number” the other day. I realized she’d never seen a dial on a phone. Now we “enter” numbers or “press” or “touch” the number on the keypad. But if it’s a friend, we still say we “speed-dialed” him. There’s an anachronism and an oxymoron all in the same new word. If you tried to “speed-dial” a phone in the fifties you’d have broken the darn ratchet wheel. Instant communication to us was picking up the phone and finding someone else on the party line. But hell, today we can play video games and take secret pictures with our cellphones, why should we care about a word for what we do when we call someone else. We can even eliminate the whole voice aspect of phones. We can “text-message” someone. Or “instant message” someone. Or simply, “message” someone.
That’s right, we don’t send someone a message. We “message” them. That’s the 21st century, in a phrase. Everybody changing nouns into verbs. Or should I say everybody Verb-ing nouns. I “message” someone instead of sending someone a message. I “task” someone to do something rather than giving someone a task. And instead of looking something up on the internet using the Google search engine, I google it. In the past tense: I googled it. Conjugate please. I had googled, I have googled, I will google, I am googling.
Oogley, boogley, googley.
America, ya gotta love it.