Word: calling
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Most people can't begin to talk about minorities because they think that the policy of political correctness is an imperative statement. That is, that the policy flatly says, "You cannot call me a 'Chink.'" I would rather consider the policy a conditional statement: "If you call me a 'Chink,' you have to take responsibility for it." Because people want control of their own utterances, they obviously resent feeling gagged when they want to speak. What I think political correctness should be trying to do is to make people more conscious of what they say. Language, after all, is power...
...mouths does not change the way they think. People who push to de-gender "chairman" into "chair-human-being" to make people less sexist are going to find their action does not change political attitudes. Because most proponents of political correctness use this "backwards conditional" too often, critics fairly call this policy mind control. Real political correctness doesn't try to brainwash people, but only targets those who think that they do not have to deal with the repercussions of what they...
Once the preserve of business users, mobile phones have become an everyday consumer appliance--even a fashion accessory. Alcatel claims to have taken 10% of the world phone market with a cheap handset available in rainbow colors that appeal to women. The marriage of prepaid calling cards and cheap mobile phones has made markets in Italy, Ireland and Portugal grow nearly 38% a year because there is no subscription fee or phone bill at the end of the month. In Israel some 200,000 units of a phone known as the Mango, which can call only one number, have been...
Similar practices are spreading across Europe. In Germany, Deutsche Telekom's D1 service allows motorists to call in with a destination, then drive on, as a computer-generated voice calls back every 15 minutes with traffic information. In Italy, operator Omnitel lets users call a special number while standing in front of designated piazzas; the computer figures out where you are and plays back a recorded discourse on the art and history of the location in one of five languages...
Wouldn't it be great if you could call your friends or family, your boss or stockbroker--even while you're trekking in the Himalayas? If you didn't have to lug around one of those briefcase-size satellite phones, but instead had a cell phone just slightly larger than the one you carry now? How much of a premium would you be willing to pay for such convenience? Two American-based firms with a list of global backers that reads like a high-tech Who's Who are rolling the dice in a multibillion-dollar gamble that they...