Word: gadget
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...cream is American by right of conquest, however. George Washington owned a gadget for making ice cream. Thomas Jefferson loved it. An American woman named Nancy Johnson invented the hand-cranked, rock salt-and-ice freezer in 1846, although she neglected to patent the machine. Robert M. Green, a Philadelphia visionary, gave the world the ice-cream soda in 1874. The ice-cream cone was the hit of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 in St. Louis. Christian Nelson, an Iowa candy-store proprietor, thought up chocolate-covered ice cream in 1919 but got nowhere until Russell Stover...
Plugged-in writing is not a new phenomenon. In 1973 Hersey tried out electronic fiction writing in order to aid a Yale University computer project-and became an instant convert. But it took a while to get the gadget out of the institution and into the study. Once Carter was pictured composing his memoirs on the Lanier "No Problem," authors and others could easily imagine themselves at the console. Spurred by the new availability of word-processing programs for personal computers like Radio Shack, Apple and Atari, demand for home units has risen dramatically. Among the aficionados: Bestseller Luminaries Michael...
...parents are upset by the Craig Claiborne atmosphere in the home ec program. Under "equipment replacement," next year's budget lists $2,650 for such things as self-cleaning ovens and a microwave unit. "Microwave cooking is a new kitchen technology," argues one defender of the space-age gadget. Adds another: "With microwave ovens, the kids can cook up a meal and eat it, all in the same period.'1 "Phooey," sneers a middle-aged widow and mother of three. "The parents in this town just want high-priced baby-sitting systems for their children...
...long run, Reagan's misguided proposals will help undermine higher education and many fields of research, both of which we depend on in the struggle to improve our society. Something seems very wrong with a government determined to stock its military with every deadly gadget demanded by the Pentagon, no matter what the price, but unwilling to spend enough to maintain the quality of academic research and improve the education of its youth...
...fortunate few stores, business has never been better. Demand is strong for almost any sort of electronic gadget, from programmable calculators to video games. Sales of computer-based "smart toys" like Simon, which uses increasingly complex patterns of flashing colors and sounds as a space-age update of the old Simon Says schoolyard game, are especially robust...