oook blog

Department of Tangled Webs

Sometimes it's good to savor the branching pathways that one follows while scanning the day's blogs. Today's case in point is a Language Log posting on Words of the Year: Another year of truthiness, which notes that "Webster's New World College Dictionary went with Crackberry...", a term that showed up in a link I harvested and delicious'd yesterday. Sez the Webster's story:

Whether on BlackBerries -- the PDA's that spawned this latest appellation -- or cellphones, or other handheld devices, people hunched over these tools are a common sight. That devout-looking hunch itself, note Webster's New World editors, is called the Crackberry prayer, homage to this latest obsession...

I was reminded of the existence of a Japanese term for those who live this life, and a quick Google search retrieved oyayubizoku, via wordspy.com. I then remembered that I'd pointed to this a couple of years ago, and another quick resort to blessed Google retrieved a page summarizing some investigations on Electronic East Asia from mid-November 2004 (a lot of the links are 404 now...). And at the bottom of that page are links to two novel things I was playing with at that time: a first podcast On Musical Variety (20+ minutes, a pilot for the Cross-Cultural Studies in Music course I taught in Winter 2005) and a screencast on de.licio.us [alas, hafta use IE to view it] when it was a new service that most of my colleagues didn't know about.
...and that all connects somehow to this Gem from the Past, christened "Bad Hair Derby 1966":

Posted by oook at December 9, 2006 09:06 AM