Word: coded
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hasten to point out, a zero when it comes to digits: I've dealt for years with postal code numbers, telex codes and apartment-block addresses like 99-34 67th Road (#6D). But now, all of a sudden, I have to list extension numbers for voice mail, fax numbers for home (thus doubling the number of numbers to list and, in the process, often extending the length of each number, to cope with a digital dearth) and http://'s. To reach a friend a few blocks away, I have to type 38 letters that mean nothing, a numeral, two underlines...
...Year haiku ("the Southern Slope of Deer" is the meaning of one), all of which is doubly embarrassing since, as everyone knows, the Japanese don't have street addresses. And to call my office from this apartment involves a seven-digit access number, a 14-digit personal code and then another 14 digits. The days when I used to laugh at the Orwellian sterility of North Korean film names (The Report of No. 36, for example) seem remote indeed. And the days when New York City telephone numbers were humanized by letters--"Call me at LUddite 4-2628"--seem positively...
...suppose I first noticed this profusion when first I inscribed a six-digit post-office box number into my book, at almost exactly the same time as ZIP codes (which arrived on our shores only in 1963, to cries of "governmental harassment" from Hunter S. Thompson) began more insistently including four extra digits and a dash. Suddenly, the 213 area code for Los Angeles had sprouted seven alternatives, and French phone numbers were 10 digits long, and my friends were stockpiling spouses' names upon their own. Here in Japan, my three-digit postal code spawned two extra digits, and even...
This explosion of numbers has, of course, dramatically increased the cachet of living number-free; one of the luxuries of having a house in the English countryside is that, omitting the postal code, you can have an address made up entirely of words (viz. "Mr. Toad, Toad Hall, nr. Rat's Hole, Grahame's Head, Oxfordshire, England"). Yet somehow the figures always catch up with you in the end: villages in the Cotswolds have local phone codes five digits long--as long, in fact, as the numbers themselves. And it must be confessed that one of the only "analog" addresses...
...1970s, when students filled in endless phonics work sheets and read inane basals, and teachers felt overly controlled, whole language exercised a strong attraction. By the 1980s, it had come to dominate the teachers colleges and was strongly influencing publishers. Chall argues that the shift from a code emphasis to a meaning emphasis hurt reading scores. Citing National Assessment of Educational Progress data, she has written, "[F]rom 1971 to 1980 there was a steady improvement in the reading comprehension of nine-year-olds. However, during the 1980s...the scores did not improve and rather declined...