Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Golden Plunger Awards (47 page)

Unfortunately, microchips in pets are plagued by a few problems. Before 2003, one universal scanner could be used to read all pet microchips. But late that year, multiple microchip manufacturers began producing chips differently, and the updated technology was no longer readable by the same scanner. Companies started making their chips identifiable only by their own scanners, and animal shelters couldn’t keep up with the number of new scanners needed to identify every brand of microchip. Pets that were chipped before 2003 remain fine, but those that came after have less-than-universal coverage.

Problems with microchipping get even more complicated when they involve human beings. It’s too big of an invasion of privacy for most, and it raises complex moral and ethical issues. Still, that doesn’t mean it isn’t already being done.

In 2007, controversy swirled around a Florida-based company that announced it was partnering with caretakers of Alzheimer’s disease patients to implant microchips in people impaired by the disease. Critics responded that the plan violated privacy rights and the patients weren’t of sound enough mind to know what was being put in their bodies. Some loved ones and caretakers of the patients, though, disagreed and thought it was for the best—the chips would help them track down a person who’d wandered off. That debate continues.

Putting a chip in is easy. It doesn’t require any cutting, just a little anesthetic and a quick shot in the arm (or wherever in the body you want to put it). Microchips are usually about the size of a grain of rice.

The chips are usually referred to as RFID, meaning “radio frequency identification.” Currently, the chips themselves don’t contain much data, just a unique number. Nothing else is imprinted on the chip, and there isn’t a way at this time to place any kind of global positioning system or the like on it.

The number is read by a scanner outside the body, which connects the number with a Web-based database, presumably behind a firewall or some security system. That’s where all the information is. Once the chips are inside the body, they usually last about 15 years before wearing out, but they can’t be removed easily. Getting them out requires surgery and a tracking device, because the chips can travel inside the body. So once the chips are in, most people leave them in, even after they’ve worn out.

In July 2004, Mexican Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha and 160 of his employees were microchipped as a security measure so they could access top-secret areas of government buildings.
Other workers who need access to highly secure buildings also have had microchips implanted in them.

The Department of Defense announced in 2007 that it was looking at microchips as a way to gain important health information about soldiers wounded in the field. However, the idea that the chips were going to be used to save lives didn’t win over people who were worried that soldiers’ privacy would be compromised. A spokesman for the Veterans of Foreign Wars was quoted as saying, “Even though you shelve some of your rights as a citizen [in the military], you don’t shelve them all.”

Many people flinch at the idea of putting a microchip inside their bodies, but most don’t seem to mind carrying one around on the outside. Microchip technology has been used for years in automobiles, credit cards, and security systems. Smart card readers, like the ones used by employees to access the buildings they work in or by consumers who want to pay for gas by flashing a card by a reader, all use microchip technology.

In 2005, the U.S. government began including microchips in passport covers. Privacy-rights activists immediately challenged the move, but the State Department replied that the chips were not a privacy concern since a scanner had to be four inches away or closer to read them. Privacy advocates weren’t convinced, and the debate continues.

In 2007, a school in South Yorkshire, United Kingdom, put microchips in students’ uniforms so teachers could determine their whereabouts at any time. And retailers have begun looking into placing microchips in inventory to ward off theft.

For many, another big concern about microchips is “swiping”—the process of thieves taking information from the microchip by intercepting the radio signal. As things stand today, that concern is more for chips outside the body because they are the ones that currently hold access to sensitive data. But any of that can change as the technology continues to develop.

So, microchips will likely continue to be a major cultural concern of the 21st century. But hopefully people won’t always have to choose between their privacy and their health and safety.

Words of the Year

In 2007, the word “locavore” (a person who eats only food that has been grown or produced locally) sprang up in numerous magazines, newspapers, and blogs. Locavore was used so much that it became the
New Oxford American Dictionary
“Word of the Year.”

The American Dialect Society (ADS), a group that studies the English language, began picking a word of the year in 1990. They assembled a board of linguists, lexicographers, etymologists, grammarians, historians, researchers, writers, and scholars to select and publish a list of words that had made the most impact on the language during the past year. The ADS says its purpose in making the list each year is to show that “language change is normal, ongoing, and entertaining.” They also pick other categories, like “Most Useful” and “Most Unnecessary”—it’s surprising that many of the words of the year did not fall into the latter category.

Here’s a look back and a comprehensive list of the ADS words of the year:

2007:
subprime—a risky loan or investment.

2006:
Plutoed—to be devalued, as Pluto was when it was delisted from being a planet.

2005:
truthiness—a word invented by television personality Stephen Colbert to signify something that one wants to be true, regardless of any facts that might get in the way.

2004:
red/blue/purple states—based on the political maps prevalent during the year’s election.

2003:
metrosexual—a straight man who adopts some of the grooming and fashion habits of a gay man.

2002:
WMD/weapons of mass destruction—the phrase used as justification for the war in Iraq.

2001:
9/11—the most important event of the year could also be spelled out or written “9-11.”

2000:
Chad—the famous “hanging chads” of the 2000 presidential election—pieces of paper punched out of ballots in the contested race—put this word to much use.

1999:
Y2K—the unrealized fears surrounding the year 2000 led to this becoming one of the few obsolete words on this list; for another problem, see 1997.

1998:
E-—meaning the letter that could be put in front of just about any word in the digital age: E-mail, E-money, E-commerce.

1997:
millennium bug—this was reported to be the cause of the world’s Y2K problems.

1996:
mom—mom was chosen because of her part in the term “soccer mom.”

1995:
tie—World Wide Web and newt. The World Wide Web is the Internet; newt—the verb, not the amphibian—means to make a lot of changes despite being a newcomer. It’s from Newt Gingrich, who became Speaker of the House in 1995.

1994:
tie—Cyber and morph. Both words came about as part of the world’s growing fixation with computer technology.

1993:
information superhighway—the communications connections formed among various media.

1992:
not!—from the Wayne and Garth
Saturday Night Live
skits, “Not!” is a way to say that the sentence that preceded it is not true.

1991:
mother of all—when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991, he warned that any international challenge to his country would lead to the “mother of all wars”; the phrase gained a life of its own as a result.

1990:
Bushlips—a mash-up of Bush, the president, and lips, based on his “Read my lips” quote; it meant empty rhetoric on the political trail.

Somewhat similar to the ADS, the Global Language Monitor (GLM) is also made up of people who study language—they analyze trends to see how words are being introduced and used. They started picking their words of the year in 2000, when the company was known as
yourdictionary.com
(it became GLM in 2004):

2007:
hybrid

2006:
sustainable

2005:
refugee

2004:
incivility

2003:
embedded

2002:
misunderestimate

2001:
Ground Zero

2000:
Chad

Not to be outdone, Merriam-Webster began choosing Words of the Year in 2003. First, the dictionary ranked them according to searches users did on its Web site, and later, in 2006, the company allowed people to vote. Think of this list as the popular vote (or the People’s Choice) when it comes to words of the year. In addition, Webster’s system allows words (like “insurgent,” for example) to get picked in more than one year:

Winner:
w00t—a celebratory term, pronounced “Woot!” Signifies
a victory; mostly used in online gaming activities, which is why it uses zeroes instead of “O”s.

Runners-up: Facebook, conundrum, quixotic, blamestorm (how a group will start pointing fingers at each other for something going wrong, especially in an office setting), Sardoodledom (an unrealistic and contrived story line in a work of fiction; it comes from French playwright Victorien Sardou’s name), apathetic, Pecksnif-fian (having sleazy characteristics; from a character in a Charles Dickens story), hypocrite, charlatan

Winner:
truthiness

Runners-up:
google, decider, war, insurgent, terrorism, vendetta, sectarian, quagmire, corruption

Winner:
integrity

Runners-up:
refugee, contempt, filibuster, insipid, tsunami, pandemic, conclave, levee, inept

Winner
: blog

Runners-up:
incumbent, electoral, insurgent, hurricane, cicada, peloton (a group of bicycle riders in a race), partisan, sovereignty, defenestration

Winner:
democracy

Runners-up:
quagmire, quarantine, matrix, marriage, slog, gubernatorial, plagiarism, outage, batten

(Other dictionaries have gotten in on the act, too. We’ve already mentioned the
New Oxford American Dictionary
and its 2007 choice, “locavore.” In 2006, the folks at
New Oxford American
chose “carbon neutral.” The year before that, “podcast.”)

Words of the year often get a great deal of criticism—sometimes from members of competing groups. When Merriam-Webster announced its selection of “w00t,” the ADS Executive Secretary Allan Metcalf complained that it was “limited to a small community
and unlikely to spread and unlikely to last.” And Michelle Malkin, a reporter, writer, and blogger, criticized “locavore” this way: “Shouldn’t the word of the year be a word that more than four people have actually heard of?”

Of course, not everyone will agree on which word deserves “word of the year” honors. Sometimes, a word’s ability to sum up the culture and mental state of the year trumps its staying power. In 2005, “refugee” took on new meaning because of Hurricane Katrina. And what else but “9/11” could have come out of 2001? We may not talk about “Bushlips” much anymore, but as a gauge of society, the word of the year is like a time capsule back to a particular year’s state of mind.

William Shakespeare introduced dozens of words and phrases into our language. It’s difficult to say exactly how many, and it’s also difficult to prove he was the first one to use them. Since written records from his lifetime are spotty, no one knows if Shakespeare was the first to use these or if they were common in his time and he just wrote them down. But the fact that there are so many speaks highly of Shakespeare and is at least circumstantial evidence that he was the first to use them. Here are some words and phrases we can credit Shakespeare with: