Feeling toothy, darling?
A spray of new words has been smeared across the windscreen of the internet this week, followed closely by metaphorical roadkill under governmental wheels. "Toothing" is a new "craze" where strangers arrange illicit meetings using messages sent via Bluetooth mobile phone technology. "Bluejacking" is of closely related meaning, but more innocuously refers to sending and recieving anonymous messages of no particular intent.
In the UK, employees at a major British opera company have been banned from calling each other "darling" so as not to offend those "who may consider it inappropriate". A spokesperson ventured the issue was not about banning the word, "it's all about the context in which it is used".
Australia's Education Minister, in dismissing a plea for equality of funding between private and state schools, percieves that the State governments "want to keep a national rail gauge on education". Each year, under current funding, government school students are apportioned $1,000 while giving almost $5,000 to non-government school students. The minister himself seems not to think that clear communication is relevant to his portfolio, and let's not even mention "equity".
I am surprised that it has not yet been more widely adopted, but the self-explanatory word "iraqnam" has been recently observed in use. It seems to have appeared around August 2003, which probably correlates with when the public began to fully realise what a sorry mess the Irak campaign had become. To underline the point, ABC News ('Foreign Correspondent' - I think, though the item does not appear when searching their site) recently broadcasted a piece on some Green Berets in Irak who were proudly discussing how they were using the "same tactics" employed "successfully" in Vietnam to "win hearts and minds", without a hint of irony in their statements. Any half-witted student of military history could tell you that those tactics lost America that war: "although it flourished for ten years under cover of the wider war, covert activity in Vietnam is now recognized as a disaster" runs the publisher's blurb for one very good study of Vietnam's covert operations.
Item posted by AutoEditor at 11:38 am ::
