Filed under: %a la mod
I’ve been waiting for this for
a long time. Today, it finally happened. I was searching
for a bit of esoterica which I wouldn’t know how to look up in any
reference work; not a dictionary or an encyclopedia or even a polished
usage guide.
I entered a pair of words into Google, expecting to find a throw-away
comment about it on the third page of results; enough to satisfy
my curiosity. And there it was
— the top hit, a Wikipedia page (a discussion page at that), with
exactly what I was looking for. In gorey detail. It was as
though I had reached effortlessly into the collective subconscious and pulled out, not just what I had verbalized, but what I had been thinking.
Every other hit for the pair was one of those wordlists that so often foil googlewhacking.
For those of you who are curious, one /does/ sometimes put a diacritic over double-e’s, in early-20th century and older English.
I hope all those silly futurists were wrong about networks of
information being able to take on a life of their own.
In other
news, John Perry Barlow and all those Signal or Noise lawyers were
right about Grokster. I wonder if they are content with the
result…..