At dinner today the guy at the next table over was holding forth on something like why software is better than hardware, or why hardware is better than software, or memory sticks and writable DVD standards, or who-knows-what -- I gather he had some very emphatic point to make, but I couldn't tell where it was going. He had one of those piercing marketroid voices you just can't tune out. At first it was kind of funny, just because it seemed like somehow we had magically been transported back to 1996, but then it just got as irritating as it had been back then.
When he said "case in point!" and reached into his pocket to pull out some piece of consumer electronics to wave around for punctuation, I had to control myself from bursting out laughing, because I immediately thought "if he says vis-a-vis I'll have Bingo!"
And you thought dinosaurs were extinct.
where i come from, if you hear a geek in a restaraunt, you've scored.
at least he never said "you need to ride that wave into the eye of the tornado"(!?!)
Ahh. Catch phrase nostalgia. That reminds me that for a long time I thought the metaphoric image of "pushing the envelope" was not filling up an envelope too full, but pushing an envelope towards someone on a table top... you know, "here! you take the envelope!" I don't know what I thought was in the envelope... a bill maybe?
Actually, "pushing the envelope" is aviation jargon. The "envelope" is (from engineering jargon, I think) some set of curves that define the performance characteristics an aircraft was designed to have, and "pushing the envelope" is taking the aircraft to the maximum-performance edge of those curves, and trying to get it to do more than it was designed to do.
(I know this because my high school physics teacher was an aviation geek.)
Huh. That makes more sense to me now. In the early/mid ninties, you always heard things like "Madonna is really pushing the envelope with her sexy Sex book." I guess no one else knew what was in that envelope, either. :)
and just think, that man may be riding the infobahn at this very moment.
Um... it occurs to me that I said "Case in point" in the last email I sent you. Kill me now. It's for my own good! ;->
that much is a no-brainer!