Word: gadget
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...their U.S. competitors talked enthusiastically about multimedia but remained skeptical: after all, they had come to believe the Americans were the has-beens of the electronics business. Besides, Japan's strength lay in hardware, not fuzzy concepts. For Japanese firms, the real battle would be for the next big gadget to follow the vcr, which in 1993 was worth $7.7 billion to Japanese firms alone. As a Sony executive scoffed two years ago, ``Multimedia is just a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Nobody knows where...
...Specialist (cost: $2.95). Then, pressing the "fast-forward" button on his remote, he zipped ahead to what he said was his favorite scene -- Sharon Stone bending down to place flowers on the grave of the family she had lost to a mob bombing. He pressed "pause" and, like a gadget-crazed kid, began putting his multimillion-dollar toy through its paces. With The Specialist still on hold, he ordered a second movie, The Client, fast-forwarded to another favorite scene -- where Susan Sarandon is deciding whether or not to take Brad Renfro's case -- and pressed "pause" again...
After all, you have to wonder about people who would pore over The Star Trek Encyclopedia, with 5,000 entries on every character, planet, gadget or concept ever mentioned in the series, from gagh ("serpent worms, a Klingon culinary delicacy") to Pollux V ("planet in the Beta Geminorum system that registered with no intelligent life-forms when the Enterprise investigated that area of space on Stardate 3468"). Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek's late creator and guiding spirit, once got a letter from a group of scientists who complained about a scene in which Captain Picard visited France and looked...
Phrases like these -- or worse -- will probably never enter the realm of polite discourse, and perhaps that is just as well. Still, some instances of slang can gain such acceptance that they become useful as colloquialisms and even enter Standard English over time -- for example, blizzard, disk jockey and gadget...
...sunk about $18.9 million into the project, betting that advanced microtechnologies developed in the watch industry can be translated into innovative designs for a car's propulsion and electrical systems. "We're not trying to build some little gadget here," Hayek said on a private tour of the garage last December. "We want to have a consumer product that you can produce and use in the millions...