Every age brings with it, its own vocabulary. From the new inventions to the ‘lingo’ of the youth the forms have been different but the character has been the same. When tea was first introduced it created tea houses which became haunts of the intellectuals, artists and working men depending on where they were, and gave England the closest it has ever come to the café life of the French.
During wars whole new songs, new weapons and terrible battles enter the language and as each generation grows so the language mutates and some of the words stay, many leave. But you can create an entire society by recalling its language. Something beloved of script writers because the language gives them the erroneous right to say their work is ‘authentic’.
The computer age is no different though it is fun to see the common words of typesetting and printing become mainstream and almost everyone now knows to what leading, kerning and fonts refer. But also we now have a new use for virus and a new bug bear. The lost data. The dead piece of electronics that happens to contain so much of our lives and all of our precious memories, along with irreplaceable internet jokes.
I have just recovered the data for a friend from one such drive. It’s a little like coaxing a fire from damp paper and of course so evocative of the beginning of the end of the twentieth and beginning of twenty first centuries.