New Words

Stuart Heritage, writing for The Guardian, lists, with explanations, several new words that have come from our current tech landscape.

A few of my favorites:

Captachore

How much time do you think we have collectively spent, as a species, convincing robots that we are not robots? By now, we must have wasted several millennia ensuring we have clicked all the various parts of a bicycle on a captcha grid of someone’s front garden, or sliding a jigsaw puzzle precisely into a pixellated hole, or clicking a box that says “I am not a robot” as if the internet has suddenly discovered the honour system. Listen, if we ever want to pretend to be robots, let’s do it the old-fashioned way, by covering ourselves in tinfoil and beep-booping our way into an enemy moon-lair.

Hostageware

Not to use hyperbole, but this might be the very worst thing in all of modern society: buying a product and then realising you need a paid subscription to use it. Want a video doorbell? That’ll be a fiver a month. Fitness tracker? £30 a month. Want to print things at home, on the printer you bought, with the ink you also bought? At least a fiver a month. Want to be able to play the £70 game you bought for your £500 console online? That’ll be £7 a month for some reason. Making any sort of purchase these days is like entering into a mafia protection scheme with the worst companies in the world. God, I hate it.