The Irish novelist John Banville once mused to an interviewer that America might be a healthy place for a writer to live, since English here changes so quickly. (No link; it was over 10 years ago.) I found a good example in yesterday's Houston Chronicle. This would have been incomprehensible to all English speakers in 1950, and most of them in 1990 — gibberish even compared to the future-slang Anthony Burgess invented for A Clockwork Orange:
Viruses e-mailed to corporate addresses can trigger an alert to the sender from firewall-based antivirus software. Because most viruses that spread by e-mail falsify the sender's address, those alerts are more than useless. They can clog up e-mail servers and render inboxes unusable.
It's not quite what Banville meant, though.
posted by Michael Scott Moore |
9:15 AM
