When The News Is Yet Again Not The News

I half heard this new science breakthrough / discovery story on radio news bulletins from both RTE and BBC during the week. “Careful out there folks, you can catch Alzheimers” cautioned the story. Scientists said so, apparently.

Over the course of the morning it developed a little, into the more specific “Alzheimers is definitely contagious and you can catch it from surgery and trips to the dentist”. By evening I think it there was more interesting news to mangle and this story had disappeared from the bulletins.

I gave it the usual mental shrug I save for stories like this, decided it was highly unlikely any of this was true and thought no more of it. If I hadn’t been busy with something else during I might have put in twenty minutes poking around online to find out a bit more.

Turns out it was rubbish. Which yet again leaves me disappointed that news outlets in the should-be-better–than-that category just aren’t any better than that, and disappointed that I can routinely disregard large swathes of the news as just wrong.

✩ Want You To Know: Your website is allowed to say “innovate” once

WYTK header.png

Language and the Internet

A few short, interesting pieces on the development of new words and phrases and how their (mis)appropriation has been accelerated by the speed they can spread, free of context, across the Web.

Quite obviously neither of these women know what the hell they’re talking about. Boboltz seemed to rely almost solely on Urban Dictionary and Sales just made some shit up. What’s worse, however, is that in their explorations, they provide absolutely no context for where the word came from: BLACK PEOPLE. Without that context, they completely erase black people from a word that they not only coined but have been using for years.

'The Definition of 'Fuckboy' Is Not What Bad Trend Pieces Are Telling You'

As with most recent internet slang, “Netflix and chill” seems to have originated on Black Twitter before migrating to Instagram, Tumblr, Vine, and the outer reaches of Memeland. And in a way, it’s the perfect teenage shibboleth. If you were 16, and your parents caught you texting “Netflix and chill?” to your girlfriend, they might think you were proposing an innocent night of watching Chopped on the couch.

'How 'Netflix and chill' became internet slang for having sex'

And how did curating, a highly specialized line of museum work involving the care, accessioning, and exhibition of artworks, come to mean, as cultural policy scholar Amanda Coles puts it, “just picking stuff?”

'The Politics of the Curation Craze'

Introducing the past exonerative tense.

Haters

The title is just an excuse to post this piece. I don't think Vidal really was a hater, despite his protestations.

“I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem that could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”

'A life in feuds: how Gore Vidal gripped a nation

Worth Pondering

tech-copywriting-innovate.png

Eye Candy

moby-dick.gif

Book Cover .Gif

Totally Confused

Millennial sex games, Mayo versus Dublin memories, unbanning Wikipedia, Reddit's garbage design and hotspot ad injection

Finally, can you guess what looks like a "middlebrow kids clothing brand logo"?

Yours etc., @loughlin


Think you know someone who might like to receive more emails like this? Then forward this one on to them so they can read the words below. 

Hey! Want to be part of something hip and retro like a mailing list? Of course you do? Then head on over here to subscribe. I promise not to spam you or sell your email address to Facebook. Or Google. Or Twitter. Or anyone else at all.

Follow @WantYouToKnowHQ on Twitter for more bits and bobs.