What do you think when you hear or read the word blackberry?
I had a funny realization this week when I got an e-mail with the word blackberry in the subject line.
A press release from the LSU AgCenter said there would be a lunch talk about Blackberries. I thought it was timely considering the service outage this week.
But it wasn’t a BlackBerry you plug into the electrical socket. It was the blackberries you pull off a vine.
I may seem a little dumb for not putting that together immediately. I know the AgCenter focuses on, well, agriculture. (I was in 4-H from fifth-12th grades.) But when you’re glancing at your inbox you have to process a lot of information quickly. Read. Save. Delete. (Especially when you get an e-mail every day saying you’re reaching the maximum storage space Outlook allows.)
Still, it’s funny the images some words paint in our mind because of the way we use them now. My BlackBerry Curve has cost me plenty of money, so I can blame that mental slip on that. But four or five years ago, I probably would’ve thought about juicy, reddish berries growing on the side of a country road.
Here are some other words that name something different today than they did years ago: Mouse, diva, gay.
Who’s got more examples like those? (Yes, this post is definitely a writer/geek/nerd post.)
2 comments:
Oh, for me, the words "Southern humidity" and "military spouse" and "divorcee" definitely have a different meaning to me now than they would have four years ago. :0)
Or virus - now that takes on a completely different meaning now than it did 10 years ago.
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