This will date me, I know, but I recall a time when a mouse was something that scurried out of the crawl space, prompting people to shriek with horror and jump on the nearest chair.
It still is, of course. But these days, if I happened to talk to my sons about a mouse, they would not likely be initially envisioning a rodent with a tail. They would be thinking about something else: a cursor that moves on a laptop. No shrieking to speak of, and no chairs involved.
Same goes for a web. Sure, the sons know it’s something a spider spins in order to nab its dinner, but that may not be what they’d think of first. After all, they’re children of the computer age.
A chip? Heck in my day, it was something that was made from potatoes. You ate chips by the bagful when you were watching American Bandstand, along with a Coke and a tub of French onion dip.
The chip, let’s just say, has evolved — at least, for the under-30 crowd. As Google tells it, a chip is, first and foremost, an “integrated circuit or small wafer of semiconductor material embedded with integrated circuitry.” Huh?
I haven’t the foggiest idea what cookies are — where computers are concerned — but the younger set certainly does. All I know is that cookies have been hijacked by the techie set, and are no longer simply things made with flour and sugar, and occasionally peanut butter, oatmeal and chocolate chips. I still enjoy them immensely at teatime.
Then there are keychains. Again, this will date me, but I’ve always thought they referred to things that jingle around in the bottom of your purse, and were useful to have on hand in case you wanted to get inside your home.
Not so to the IT folks at my office. Heck, the last time I was having trouble logging on, one of them appeared at the side of my desk and wondered if I’d remembered to change the password on my keychains. I looked puzzled, dinosaur that I am, and raised my eyebrows. My keychains have, well, plenty of keys, but not one of them has a password.
And memory? Hey, at one time is was a pretty useful tool that helped me keep track of people’s birthdays, anniversaries and phone numbers.
But memory’s now also a computer term. Just can’t remember what it means.
