Word: beltways
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...never visited the World Wide Web. ("My kids have promised to teach me this summer.") Ask for their E-mail address, and they sheepishly start patting their suits, as if for a lost pen, and finally say, "My secretary knows it, I think." To a denizen of the Other Beltway, this is like not knowing your own phone number. (And the tired Washington posture of "I'm such a busy big shot that my secretary runs my life" is also foreign to the Other Beltway, where the preferred macho posture is "I've got my whole life right here...
...What is this thing Pathfinder I keep hearing about?" Answer: Pathfinder is one of the most heavily trafficked sites on the Web. The company that owns this very magazine has spent untold millions building and promoting it. Time Warner executives will be disappointed to learn that none of these Beltway honchos could identify it. One person--an actual Time Warner employee--volunteered, "Oh, I know! It's just like Netscape!" Netscape Navigator is the leading browser software that allows your computer to use the Web. This would be like someone from the Other Beltway saying, "Newt Gingrich...
...happy and productive life does not require knowing that Trent Lott is the Senate majority leader. Not knowing may even help. But anyone inside the Washington Beltway could tell you who Trent Lott is, just as anyone inside the Other Beltway knows the difference between Pathfinder and Netscape. And each would be struck by the other's ignorance. The "incomprehension" between the Two Beltways, in Snow's term, does run in both directions...
...Other Beltway's language does have the edge in one respect: informality. I felt no qualm about E-mailing "Hi Joel" to someone I had never met. ("Hi Jon," I E-mailed to Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley when he announced that he'd gone online, adding helpfully, "This is the proper form of salutation in cyberspace." Yardley answered, jokingly, "Dear Mr. Kinsley: This is the proper form of salutation in Washington.") The same informality applies to dress, which in this world--where style is set by barely socialized young computer geeks--has moved beyond the studied informality...
...indeed combined doing well and doing good--getting rich and making the world a better place--with more success, probably, than any similar-size group of people in the history of the world. And for biotech, especially, the miracles are just beginning. If the citizens of this Other Beltway wish to believe they're doing more good for the world than their counterparts in the Washington Beltway, they can make a good case...