Two warring memes: “The Total Depravity of Man” and “The Only Infinite Resource is Human Stupidity”. One of the things I detest most about Mass Media Podpeople is that as a class they are either woefully subliterate or engaged in a conspiracy to dumb down their audience. Either view is supportable from the evidence. Here’s a relatively innocuous one. (“Relatively” only because it affects few people directly.)
Mr C’s 7 Signs That Your Kid May Be A Hacker
Yeh. Mass Media Podpeople even in low-brow fake techie mags.
Debasing the language is what Mass Media Podpeople do best, with outright lies, twisting of truths (into lies) and distortions by deliberate (or stupid) misuse of words, so that words repeated often enough take on meanings foreign to their etymology. Mass Media Podpeople of all stripes do it, as the cutsy eWeek slideshow linked above demonstrates. Hijacking–once again–“hacking” and using the term to refer to cracking. (See here for a decent treatment of the terms.)
I’m almost tempted to start a “Mass Media Podpeople most misused word of the week” feature. The drawback? How to choose a most misused word… Reader feedback, a poll or some such would probably help, but that’s kinda like, well, work (echoes of Maynard G. Krebs), and I’m just playing this game to mollify the voices in my head.
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