Word: genericizing
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...Behavior (Knopf; 275 pages; $24), does make some good jokes about our increasing desire to kowtow to celebrities. Having interviewed a slew of them for magazines, and having been interviewed almost as much himself since his first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, was published in 1984, McInerney knows how generic the whole experience is. The main character in Model Behavior just hits a button on his keypad to produce a paragraph about an actor living in Montana (CTRL, Mont) or a starlet claiming she still thinks of herself as ugly (SHIFT, What, me sexy?) for the magazine profiles he writes...
...mere two years another movie about its protagonist, the legendary distance runner Steve Prefontaine, which flopped miserably. Without Limits, which is a very good movie, will require a stroke of marketing genius to succeed. Or an unusual effort at understanding--a willingness by the audience to set aside generic expectations and engage the movie on its own terms...
...many Appleistas with him offered him theirs, the security guard threatened to confiscate the passes and call state troopers. Despite the flurry of frantic cell-phone calls and cries of "Don't you know who this is?" the guard refused to budge. Jobs had to retreat and find a generic pass with which to enter his own convention. Maybe the guard was a Windows user. --Reported by Daniel Eisenberg...
...there is the generic accusation of incompetence, of ignorance, of failure. The words of Cellucci, Finneran and Silber may have been intended to strike fear into educators, to inspire change and improvement. But without the true commitment to education and the decency to inform the test-takers of their performance first before sharing it with the world, they have only done damage to what is, at its best, truly the most noble profession...
There is no such generic term (yet) for the storage medium that's quickly replacing the standard floppy. Instead, each of the competitors in this booming market is selling its own thing: ultra-high-density floppies by many other names. You've probably heard of the Zip drive, for instance, the purple-hued peripheral from Iomega that reads and writes to 100-meg removable discs. Lots of people use Zips at my office. So, a few months ago, instead of doing a lick of research, I bolted out to the nearest Staples and picked up a Zip drive...