iZombie

iPod zombies, a digital undead army lurching through the streets. We may call it the iPod zombie trance, but it's a device-agnostic state, since this living dead horde also consists of iPhone zombies, BlackBerry zombies, and the generic MP3 zombies and cellphone zombies.
The iPod zombie pedestrian isn't alone in needing earbuds and a tiny screen these days. Others in a state of iPod oblivion include iPod zombie joggers, iPod zombie dog walkers, iPod zombie cyclists, and iPod zombie rollerbladers.

iPod pedestrians (or, iPodes­trians) people regularly—you might even say compulsively—read and compose e-mail while walking down the street. But that's not all people do while power walking to their next appointments. They also text, read Facebook and Twitter status updates, scan RSS feeds, and more than anything else, they bliss out to their favorite tunes at unhealthily loud volume levels.

Similarly, in your local Starbucks, you've probably seen your share of laptop zombies who are oblivious to everyone and everything except the screen in front of them.
If walking while texting and other forms of pedestrian inattention were merely comical, no one would worry about them too much. But attention is a zero-sum game, so concentrating on your iPod results in a technological autism or unintentional blindness that can lead to near collisions with fellow pedestrians and actual collisions with street lamps. One study found digital music players to blame for up to 17 accidents every day in the UK.

The preferred term for this among cognitive scientists is inattentional blindness, which they define as "the failure to detect the appearance of an unexpected, task-irrelevant object in the visual field." So if you're zoned out listening to Arcade Fire at top volume (the task) and you fail to see an oncoming vehicle (the unexpected, task-irrelevant object), that's IB, and that's probably trouble, perhaps even death by iPod.

The risks increase if the driver of the car bearing down on you is preoccupied reading or sending text messages, a form of digital drunkenness known as being intexticated. An incredibly dangerous habit, intextication is also called DWT, or driving while texting. If the driver is preoccupied with a cellphone call instead, call it DWY, or driving while yakking—abbreviations that play on the legal term DWI, or driving while intoxicated.

Published on: spectrum.ieee.org

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Distracted driving buzzwords

Puns, put-down and fresh coinages from the white-hot furnace of e-culture

What do you call the loss of productivity caused by too much time spent on Facebook? "Social notworking." A steeply devalued retirement account? "201(k)." A painfully obsolete cellphone? "Brickberry."

These linguistic dispatches from the land of cooler-than-you come courtesy of wit-mongers Cramer-Krasselt, a Chicago-headquartered full-service agency with a tidy billion dollars in annual billables. C-K's notable accounts include Corona beer, AirTran Airways, Levitra and Porsche -- which sounds like a recipe for a wild weekend in Fort Myers, Fla.
For the second year, the firm has published its Cultural Dictionary of the zeitgeist-iest words and phrases, pulling together -- as only an office full of droll and snarky hipsters can -- the slang, puns, put-downs and freshly minted coinages from the white-hot furnace of electronic culture. It's pretty hilarious.
To wait impatiently while the SMS system catches up, for example, is to be "textually frustrated." "Baling out" is F-bombing a helpless underling a la Christian Bale; "Blago" here appears as an expletive, as in "Holy Blago, Christian Bale really Blagoed the pooch!" Some entries are simply Web wastrels, such as "pwn" (to triumph utterly over another) and "gr7" (pretty good, but not gr8). Hit your teenagers with these and watch their eyes narrow with suspicion, or is that respect?
And yet many of C-K's entries offer real insight, even wisdom, to a consumer culture constantly trying to figure itself out.
The first question, though, is why an ad agency would bother. Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure famously wrote, "There is no thought without words" . . . sort of. Actually, he wrote, "La pensee, chaotique de sa nature, est forcee de se preciser en se decomposant." Which I translate as, "Thought, naturally chaotic, becomes concrete and precise in the framing of language."

Source: Ihavenet

YUCKIES

Young Unwitting Costly Kids – a dubious acronym for adult children who rely on financial support from their parents.

Writing for The Telegraph, Bryony Gordon confessed: My name is Bryony and I am a Yuckie. It’s not quite the word I wanted to use to describe myself, but there it is, the latest acronym trotted out to denote what I am: a Young Unwitting Costly Kid, sapping my baby-boomer parents of all their hard-earned savings, and probably their will to live. New research released this week has found that an incredible 93 per cent of parents contribute to the finances of their Yuckies. Previously I have been a Kipper – Kids In Parents’ Pockets Eroding Retirement Savings – while other members of my generation – I think that we are Generation Y, or perhaps I; one can never quite be sure – have been described as boomerang kids, returning to live at home when they really should know better.
According to a survey by a UK charity, two thirds of parents have reduced their own living costs to assist their 18–30-year-old children, and a third are going so far as to remortgage their homes. As the Telegraph noted: It is the latest evidence of how so-called Babygloomers are feeling the financial squeeze of funding both their own children and their parents.

published on: Schott's Vocab

Facebook speak: Teenagers create secret online language

Teenagers on social networking sittes are creating a secret language to stop adults knowing what they are up to, researchers say.

published on: Telegraph

The teens are using it to stop parents and employers judging them by their social activities such as partying and drinking.Instead of writing they are drunk, teens post 'Getting MWI' - or Mad With It.
Being in a relationship is known as 'taken' or 'Ownageeee', and 'Ridneck', a corruption of redneck, means to feel embarassed.
Meanwhile, girls posting 'Legal' are indicating that they are above 16 and legally allowed to have sex.
Lisa Whittaker, a postgraduate student at the University of Stirling, who studied teens aged 16-18 on Bebo in Scotland, said the slang had been created to keep their activities private, and cited the example of one young girl who was sacked after bosses found pictures of her drinking on the website.
"Young people often distort the languages they use by making the pages difficult for those unfamiliar with the distortions and colloquialisms," she said.
"The language used on Bebo seems to go beyond abbreviations that are commonly used in text messaging, such as removing all the vowels.
"This is not just bad spelling, which would suggest literacy issues, but a deliberate attempt to creatively misspell words.
"The creation and use of their own social language may be a deliberate attempt to keep adults from understanding what is written on the page.
"By doing this they are able to communicate with their in-group and conceal the content from the out-group. This further adds to their online identity."
She said that one reason for encoding their messages was to keep adults in the dark about their drinking or smoking. She is due to present her research at a seminar at the Wales Institute of Social & Economic Research, Data and Methods in Cardiff on Tuesday.