Of Saints and Sorcery
The SMH has a wonderful chronological list of the buzz-words of the last 100 years. Some puzzling, some amusing - like these two:
1974 - punk
1975 - detox
Although, having personally graduated in the class of '77, "punk" really wasn't common as a term until '76; though to be accurate the Saints started in '74 in Brisbane (and never called themselves by that label.) The proximity of "punk" and "detox" is pretty damn funny though.
I'm tempted to question a few of the dates given, like above, and also ones like "1990- applet" - again having spent more than a couple of years in IT, I don't recall "applets" being the buzz until the mid-90's when Sun launched Java for the web. Even stranger to me is:
1952 - Generation X
1953 - hippy
which seems way too early. Still it's an interesting list, and should information come to hand on how exactly it was determined, I shall post it. This year's is "Chav" - defined by the SMH as "young louts who wear cheap gold jewellery and baseball caps and hang around in shopping centres all over Britain".
The Herald has an intriguing piece on sorcery in the Highlands of PNG, and notes that "PNG has laws which differentiate between sorcery for good and evil purposes" - a stark contrast to the society that inhabits the next continent. The SMH also has coverage of the European Social Forum which manages to actually succeed in balancing reporting and humour without denigrating, a rare achievement these days, eg: "But one should not be too critical. The European Social Forum has only had three years to work on its solutions to global inequality compared with the past 2000 years of religious oppression and hierarchical rule". The paper also puts forward another neologism - "blirting" for "blackberry flirting" - similar to "toothing" I presume, and signalling a further disengagement of human courting behaviour from the confrontingly actual towards the disarmingly disposable virtual.
Item posted by AutoEditor at 9:36 am ::
