When I was a little kid, my mother introduced me to the ambiguities of the English language by telling me I shouldn't be afraid of the Purple People Eater because he only eats purple people. So when I was working on this post, I thought of Sheb Wooley, and now that song is stuck in my head.
It wasn't so much the programmers, but the higher-ups who insisted on DJs never playing a song longer than three minutes so they could sell X units of ads. That's the reason record companies made a shorter single that faded out, because otherwise they wouldn't get radio play for the full version.
Writing this post brought back memories. In 1982, I was shopping for a car and a dealer tried his best to sell me a DeLorean at a bargain price. It was funny because the John DeLorean story was still in the news and the car was a joke. I asked him where could I get service and parts for it. He said, "Here ...until I get rid of these four cars." We both laughed.
Fast forward 25 years. Early in my writing career, I made a list of cars as metaphors. I wrote about the DeLorean as a metaphor for "failure." I then found out that the internet was populated by people 10-15 years younger than I am. The readers raked me over the coals, because a DeLorean to them is a "time machine." They were young when Back to the Future came out, and completely missed the joke that the DeLorean was selected for the film because it was a failure (although a pretty cool-looking one). I, being an adult in 1985, really enjoyed the movie but missed how important it became to kids of that time.
Fahrenheit is a scale based on human comfort. Zero is really cold, and 100 is really hot, in human terms. It's quite simple, but not at all random. Centigrade is fine when you want to boil or freeze water. Kelvin is for mad scientists.
This post is a breathtakingly perfect example of doublespeak. What is it about, anyway? A person with low vision using a text-to-speech app would be flummoxed.
Fast forward 25 years. Early in my writing career, I made a list of cars as metaphors. I wrote about the DeLorean as a metaphor for "failure." I then found out that the internet was populated by people 10-15 years younger than I am. The readers raked me over the coals, because a DeLorean to them is a "time machine." They were young when Back to the Future came out, and completely missed the joke that the DeLorean was selected for the film because it was a failure (although a pretty cool-looking one). I, being an adult in 1985, really enjoyed the movie but missed how important it became to kids of that time.