#49 Computation Conjugation Cogitation

It’s so cool living in a time of great cultural change. Specifically, I mean all the great new words we get to use cause new technology and new fads force us into it. I talked once before about Google. And how fun it is to go about googling things. I’m sure the two guys who invented Google are sitting back pretty happy. Not only did they whip up one of the greatest search engines of all time, but their process became a verb in its own right. They’re probably snickering behind their palm pilots at poor old Bill Gates right now. Nobody ever MS-DOS-ed anything. Or “windowed” their computer.
Or how about the word "font"? Did anyone not in the printing industry even know the meaning of the word font before 1990? Much less use it in everyday conversation, or trot out comparisons thereof to embarrass a major TV journalist?
For a while, we used to boot things up, though I think that’s fallen out of favor now. In this angry new millennium, boot and up are more commonly used to indicate the placement of same in someone else’s derriere. And computers have become so commonplace we treat them like any other household appliance or machine. We fire them up, or more genteelly, turn them on. And the sixties’ meaning of turning someone or something on, as in introducing them to a new experience, has gradually morphed back into its more technically-oriented connotation. In fact, the whole tune-in, turn-on, drop-out, live-back-in-the-forest thing has been replaced by the always-on, hooked-up, plugged-in techno-society. Phones sprout from our ears and we pick our coffee shops based on whether or not they have wireless capability, so we can sip our cappuccinos, fire up our laptops and surf the internet. In my day surfing was something you did at the beach, not the coffee shop, and if I ever fired up my laptop it was because a flaming coal fell out of my pipe.
And speaking of coffee shops. Long gone is the neighborhood tavern as a daytime social meeting place. Today it’s the coffee shop. There are so many coffee shops now, the owners are hard put what to call them. “Coffee House” is one option used. I don’t know. Seems kind of warm on one hand, but a little like a halfway house on the other. “Coffee Bar” is another: I guess trying to conjure up a little of the old tavern’s mellow alcoholic conviviality and less of the hyper-technoid espresso twitchiness you sometimes see. I saw a new one the other day. A coffee Café. Nice try. I guess it was because they were hoping to invoke the nostalgic feeling of the fifties. But I had to laugh. Back then, little restaurants that served coffee were called cafés because—um—café means coffee.
“Hey Hon, let’s go down to the coffee coffee and fire up our laptops.”
“Okay Sweetie, but only if we can morph something...”
America, ya gotta love it.