On a given day, I realize how many things have changed since 1991 when ACUMEN Corporation opened our first office. Technology has advanced at such a brisk pace that, even for a technology company, it can become quite a chore keeping up. Of course, there is always a light side to the technology story. For instance, our language itself is evolving. So much so that words that might have been considered slang in years past now appear in respected dictionaries.
With our daily lives being impacted by these changes, I thought it might be fun to list some phrases that would absolutely befuddle someone in the 1960s, 70s or even in many cases the 1980s. Here is just a small sampling of ones that immediately came to mind.
Do you IM with your mom?
I’ve got Zep on my mp3
I’m doing a lot of blogging now
There aren’t enough cell towers around here
I understand that Uber is going driverless
I’ll Facetime you later
I just loved that podcast
Hey Siri, Google “who wrote War and Peace?”
I finally learned how to sync my Blaze
Even in our industry the terminology has evolved rapidly. Take ERP for instance. That is the common acronym for Enterprise Resource Planning, which refers to a class of software that is designed to automate entire companies from manufacturing to accounting. It seems like that label and the acronym have been around for decades. In fact, it was only introduced by Gartner Group in the 1990s.
I suspect the pace of innovation will continue to accelerate and along with it the evolution of the language. If you’d like to discuss this reality further, just IM me or leave me a VM.
