Group Selfie Anyone?

English teachers understand that language is dynamic and that it changes and evolves over time. Old words become archaic and fall by the wayside, others are modified.                

And people develop their own regional jargon. On a trip to Australia, after I asked for direction from a local in Sydney he replied for a minute or two. I thanked him and we moved on although we had understood only a few words!

People create words when they find nothing suitable in the lexicon. My mother used to talk of the half-season, the first warm days of spring when you encounter people still wearing their winter jackets while others show off in shorts. Very appropriate I always thought.

The English language has over a million words. And the number continues to increase. Many become part of the language landscape gradually, and some of them quickly fall out of usage. Case in point, in 2006 the verb pluto (meaning devalue, as in: I was plutoed when I lost my job) became popular after the planet lost its status, but the word itself seems to have lost its status nowadays.

The Oxford English Dictionary regularly publishes a list of new words to be included in its latest edition. Some of these words may have been in common usage for some time but they thus become formally confirmed.  Their official word of the year for 2013 is selfie which we all know means a self-picture, sometimes with one or more people. But the word knows no bound. There is helfie, a picture of one’s hair; belfie, a picture of one’s posterior; shelfie, a picture of one’s books; etc.    

Other new words that caught my attention include shvitz, a sauna or steam bath; cyberespionage and cyberspying whose meanings are clear. But there are also some phrasal verbs: gin someone up, which means arouse strong feelings in someone; death glare, a hostile look directed at a particular person; food coma, which refers to the lethargy we have all experienced after eating lots of food.     Teenagers seem to favor certain words at certain times. Awesome is now the word which applies to almost anything and anyone. But, let’s not forget that cool is still very much in usage, even as a verb. One day when I asked my granddaughter if a certain top would look good on me, she replied, Try it on and I’ll coolify it. Says it all, don't you think?

Spin has many meanings. While we are all familiar with spin the bottle, being a spin doctor is a latter-day definition which describes what politicians caught in possible career-ending dilemmas become. But the most creative use of a spin can be found on applications for dating services when no-longer-quite-as-young people find all sorts of ways of avoiding terms like chubby or balding, preferring things like warmly hugable. Perfect for a selfie!

         

Changing Memory

I don’t know about you, but I find that many people in their middle years seem to enjoy nothing better than living in the past. Their retrograde memory takes them through a rosy nostalgic distortion of the good old days, or at least what they consider to have been the good old days. To them, everything was better in nineteen-forgotten. Somehow crime did not exist, family life was perfect, people were more polite, and so on.

And then there are those with a selective memory. They remember only those things they want to remember. For some it’s some past hurt they have nurtured for decades because they hope to, some day, be vindicated. What’s the use? As far as I am concerned, a selective memory can be put to better use by rejoicing in reliving happy events, while throwing the hard facts of pain and heartbreak out the window. After all, do we really need to overload our memory bank with what is best left forgotten?

Someone said that a clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory. While it may have been said in jest, there is some truth to that statement. As the years pile on, happy are those who disregard the less-than-perfect aspects of the past to concentrate on the present. After all, we cannot go back to change history, and ruing what we may have done and might do differently today is a waste of precious energy. For me, there is much too much living on which to concentrate at this very moment.

 

 

 

Technology’s  Wonder

I don’t know about you, but I’m always impressed when I read about some new technological discoveries. And when you think about it, the inventions we have seen since the dawn of the century are not only amazing but coming along so rapidly they are dizzying.

          Technology keeps on keeping on. New advances now making full use of the brain are the wonder of our age as they help the disabled. Case in point, the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who has suffered from ALS for decades, has been able to continue his work despite his ever-increasing physical limitations. At one point, keyboards were adapted to obey his voice commands, but these days Hawking writes using his brain. A chip in his eyeglasses makes it possible for him to pick up radio waves from his mind and transfer them to his laptop so he can type mentally. Amazing or what?

          And other disabled people who have a chip inserted in the brain and then connected to a laptop are able to mentally operate a wheelchair and household appliances, surf the net, write e-mails, even if they are totally paralyzed. The implanted chip is a sort of brain pacemaker about the size of a dime. What a welcome advance for so many paraplegics.

          And for us who are no longer as young as we used to be and who may fear dementia in the future, technology may have a welcome solution. Researchers are working on the possibility of inserting a chip/pacemaker in the brain of people with memory problems that would upload memory. That technology is more than mind-boggling, and when you consider the number of seniors who suffer from dementia, it would amazingly redefine the golden years for an awful lot of people.  

          And who knows what other advances we’ll see in the next few years. Hoorah for our technological age!

         

 

A LITTLE PLANNING

When it comes to retirement, boomers are of two minds: those who say they’ll never retire, those who can’t wait to get out of the working game, and those somewhere in the middle in their thinking. These last ones plan to ease out of work on a gradual basis, which in my view, is probably the best way to go. With a little planning, they can taste a new life while still not letting go completely of the work they loved over decades.

It used to be people retired and did little—little planning, little exercising, little smiling. Things have evolved. It used to be you were old at sixty while now seventy is the new fifty. Baby boomers are more active than ever and, because of advances in health care and wide information dissemination, can look forward to a long retirement. In fact, it is predicted that most of today’s boomers will live well into their nineties. That’s a lot of years to do little.

I firmly believe that, like any other stage of life, retirement has to be planned to some extent. We certainly cannot plan every minute of every day, but there should be a guiding desire toward a goal. We are all different so goals will be different for everyone. A friend, who is about to retire, told me recently that he has not planned anything beyond playing golf as much as he can. That’s certainly a nice enjoyable goal, but there has to be more to life in retirement.

Just as we chose careers that appealed to us, that fit our personalities, our choice of activities in retirement should be based on what moves us, makes us feel good, not what friends or family feel we should be doing. I know a man who turned to photography in retirement and is having a grand old time. He was a chef all his life so his children thought he would spend his retirement preparing meals for them. They had trouble accepting that he wanted out of the kitchen to embrace a new passion. He’s the perfect example of a fulfilled retiree. Good for him, I say. A retiree’s mantra should be change for the new, the fun, the fulfilling.

 

 

 

The Good Side of February

February is not all bad, even this year when so far it’s been rather nasty towards us in North America. But we can take comfort in the fact that it is short, which means it’ll soon be over. Thank goodness.

            But there are other good things about February. For example, it’s when we can really feel that the days are getting longer. I don’t know about you, but for me that means that spring is well on its way. While in this part of the world we may be buried in snow in February, I would find it difficult to live in a country where there is basically one season, summer, and where the number of daylight hours never varies. That’s certainly the case around the equator where days and nights are twelve hours each, day in and day out. The fact that we rejoice in longer daylight hours at this time of year in this part of the world is cause for optimism, for looking forward to a new season, for witnessing renewal.

            They say that as we get older, we get more and more like our parents. I realized that was indeed the case in my life the other day. The sun was shining brightly and, while it was bitterly cold outside, I could feel the warming rays through the windows in the front of the house. That’s when I did what my mother always did on sunny days in February—I raised the blinds to let the front rooms be bathed in sunshine and warmth. Giving us an early taste of spring’s wonder is indeed another good thing about February.

            As I get older, I continue to appreciate the four seasons every year, even winter. The way I figure it February gets nasty because it feels its end is at hand so it puts up a fuss in protest. And that’s not all bad. After February’s nastiness, we’ll be that much more appreciative of the rebirth spring will bring.

           

 

The death of privacy

When I tried to explain to my grandchildren that, as I was growing up, black-and-white television was the norm, they simply could not believe it. After all they live in a world of high definition.

          We, of a certain age, have witnessed so much change in the last few years that it is difficult to explain it all to a younger generation. For one thing, I really don’t know how we lived before ATMs, but somehow we did. We all remember a time when we had to go to our own branch to get money. Amazingly today we can access our bank accounts from basically anywhere in the world. And it is difficult now to imagine a time when personal computers and the Internet were unheard of. Add to that today’s wireless technology that belonged to the realm of sci-fi not so long ago, and we can truly say we’ve come a long way, baby.

          If you spend enough time surfing the Internet, there is no information you can’t find. It can be very useful and helpful. But the Web is also a huge trash dumpster for everything from pornography to information on making bombs. I don’t think we should be ashamed to discuss the less-than-perfect aspects of technology with our impressionable grandchildren because you never know on what site they might end up.

          Today, personal mobile devices can do almost anything except perhaps make dinner. For a techno-deficient person like myself it can be overwhelming as privacy is quickly becoming a thing of the past. You could be anywhere talking to someone while another person could be taking your picture, taping your conversation and posting it all online in a matter of seconds for the world to see, something the famous and the infamous are finding out daily.

          With all the technology that keeps on marching at a mind-dizzying pace, the future of privacy is looming ever less assured, and I think it should worry all of us. Not only is Big Brother watching with listening devices and cameras everywhere, but so is our neighbor, our colleague, our competitor. I don’t think I’d like to go back to the time of black-and-white television, but since nothing is ever perfect in this world, we should all pay a lot more attention to what is being loss through the advent of greater and greater technology to make sure the slope does not get more slippery than sadly it already is.