[etni] Fw: anorak
- From: "Ask" <ask@xxxxxxxx>
- To: <etni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 27 Jan 2006 07:12:37 +0200
----- Original Message -----
From: claudia - claudiagsh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Fw: anorak
Some time ago somebody was asking about the meaning of the word ¨anorak¨. I
don´t remember if somebody answered, but just today I came across this. It
might be useful.
Here´s the link and the contents of the transcript.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/music/retroenglish/index.shtml
1: Tony Thorne:
Technology really finally becomes something that's in everybody's hands and
in everybody's homes and everybody's minds. So there's a whole explosion of
language to go with it: 'the information super highway', 'the web', 'the
net', 'to be online' - to be permanently online! - i.e., it's like the
global village. Concepts like 'VR' (virtual reality) and all those 'cyber'
expressions: cyber space, cyber punk, cyber cafe, cyber sex... 'The hacker',
'the dot-com' (you know, the sudden new internet company), 'dot-commers'
(all the people involved in these internet start-ups at the end of the
90's). You get 'e-mail', then you get 'e-tail' - retailing by internet.
2: Tony Thorne
The crude kind of arcade games of the 70's and the video games of the 80's
had turned into very very sophisticated programmes and packages by the 90's,
again evolving very quickly from things like dungeons and dragons in the
80's through to incredibly complex - sometimes incredibly violent, sometimes
incredibly visually impressive - computer games. And so you get 'gamesters'
and 'game masters', who become experts at not just playing these games, but
also writing them, interacting with them. And then the whole thing, of
course, goes on the net and becomes available to everybody and becomes
global - so gaming goes global.
3: Tony Thorne
These geeks and nerds and anoraks actually were the people who became
empowered during the 90's. And so these terms, which were all insults
meaning 'misfits', sometimes were even used with a kind of grudging
admiration:
'We've got a real problem, a software problem, we'd better call in the
nerds.'
'Who can we give this problem to? - The geeks will deal with it.'
You know, 'the ideal person for this job would be an anorak.'
So you know, there is a kind of slightly new attitude to these former losers
and misfits.
I hope it´s not too late!
Claudia.
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