One of my personal fascinations is
the way words evolve in our wonderful language. The advent of new technologies
often drives this process.
So we have words like
"post" and "tweet" being redirected to new actions.
"Tweet" is only rarely used these days to indicate a sound emerging
from a bird, but used in practically every sentence when referencing some hard
or soft news item about world events or celebrities.
Likewise, "posting" has
evolved to mean exposing yourself on the internet in a variety of safe and
unsafe ways, whether by you or someone you know, or a malicious hacker just
looking for something bad to do when he finds your honeymoon night pictures on
the cloud. Mooning on your honeymoon and actually taking a picture and storing
it on a supposedly safer remote server is no longer safe.
"Cloud," BTW, still means
something insubstantial and unreliable. Which can sometimes cause a flood of
destructiveness.
Anyhow, I heard a guy talking the
other day about the motions his fingers use on his touchscreen devices. Tablets
or smartphones, you still have to use certain digital gestures to get action.
"Digital" in this sense being the original meaning, involving actual
digits we sometimes call fingers.
The words for those gestures are
"tapping," "pinching" and "swiping." I
intuitively grasped the meaning of "tapping" right away.
"Swiping" is also pretty self-explanatory. You swipe your finger
across the screen to open, close, and move stuff around.
"Pinching," however, is
problematic. When you pinch an image on a digital device you make it smaller.
So what is the word for when you do the opposite of pinch and make it larger?
Spreading? Not so good. But it's
alternative, "anti-pinching" is even worse.
Sounds like a wine-guzzling family
Thanksgiving dinner gone bad.
America, ya gotta love it.
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