Word: familiarization
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...verbal vocabulary of the strip was one of the only languages that kept both the younger and older generation fluent with each other. Schulz's phrase "security blanket," and his ideas about that most American of concepts, happiness, found their way into Webster's dictionary and "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations." The names and subversive attributes of his characters filtered into the counterculture of the '60s; the Grateful Dead's defiantly grubby organist, Ron McKernan, was nicknamed Pig Pen; another San Francisco rock band that formed in 1966 called itself Sopwith Camel. As American soldiers stenciled Snoopy onto their helmets...
...such gritty films as ?Sling Blade? and ?Dead Man Walking,? but Bush has different tastes. A clue? His favorite book and TV movie of all time is ?Lonesome Dove.? Consequently we will no longer see White House events attended by a procession of faces - Streisand, Spielberg, Cruise and Hanks - familiar from ?Entertainment Tonight...
...with these new technological solutions come also new technological problems. We are all familiar with the threat of the YM problem last year, when the abaci that recorded the Year CMXCVIIIJ were to roll over and show the year...well, something other than the Year M. [The lack of a zero can cause problems sometimes.] Luckily, few people were using the abacus, since it had only been introduced to Europe a few decades earlier by Gerbert of Aurillac, now Pope Sylvester II. [This is part of how you got to be Pope in those days. Want to make friends...
...speedy meeting, fraught with symbolism. After greeting each other with cordial smiles and vigorous handshakes, Vice President Al Gore and President-elect George W. Bush conferred privately for about 20 minutes Tuesday at the vice president's residence. The talk, aides report, centered on reconciliation and the now-familiar theme of "healing the wounds" left by a bitter election and post-election cycle. They could have talked about peanut brittle, of course, and it wouldn't have made much difference. The healing was all in the pre-confab photo...
...look back...well, why look back? The technological revolution has no rearview mirror. We have not only seen the future, we've moved into it. Yesterday is history. Familiar forms will disappear. Who needs fiction when we have Survivor and the Florida Supreme Court? And new formats will change what designer Bruce Mau calls "the global image economy." Soon the multiplexes will go digital; "films" will no longer exist. We're already consuming e-books, e-movies, e-music. Egad...