I was recently in Manhattan on business and took the opportunity to have dinner with our dear friends Allison Tolman and her beau Peter Cohen. In the course of our conversation, I was explaining what an IT industry analyst does for a living by referring to the now-famous (at least in the worlds of analysts and consultants) UPS commercial about the two consultants that first aired, I believe, during the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.

As I described the ad, Peter’s smile kept getting bigger and bigger. I paused and said, "What’s so funny?" Peter replied, "That’s my ad." My jaw dropped to the floor. I’ve know Peter for years and I never knew he’d been involved with one of my all-time favorite ads. Mostly, we would talk about his creative work for Sun Microsystems, but that’s a topic for another post…؟

Check out Peter’s other work as well.

Facebook called a halt to the promotion because the promotion actually told the dropped friends they had been dropped…for a hamburger. Ouch! Something about privacy issues. How about just plain human cruelty issues? Can you top this one?

I would really like to me the person would came up with such a wickedly perverse marketing campaign. I think we would really hit it off.

PS I would never drop 10 Facebook friends for a mere hamburger. I’d need at least a Triple Whopper with Cheese. uhhhHHHhhrghhhuuuuHHHggrruhhhHHhh

Here’s the description:

SUPERUSELESS SUPERPOWER: In-flight flight

Being able to soar through the air still won’t save you from recycled oxygen and endless stories from complete strangers. Known as the "Cabin Sparrow," this so-called power lets you fly, but only within the confines of an airplane. At least you can leapfrog the beverage cart when explosive diarrhea strikes at 30,000 feet.

Maybe the power just appeals to me because I fly so much.

All the funny SS’s got me thinking about SUPERUSELESS IT SUPERPOWERS! How about

Nine-Track Magtape Vision

Able to read data of a 9-track magnetic tape with your own eyes — albeit at 1 bit per second!

Let me know what SUPERUSELESS IT SUPERPOWERS you’d like to have.

Warning –Use of the f’bomb: http://www.stickergiant.com/Charts-and-Graphs_d49.html

via Marta Strickland

But not to worry, now there’s the Extinction Timeline:

Extinction Timeline: what will disappear from our lives before 2050

I think we should enter negotiations with the author, Ross Dawson, for adding extinction analysis to hype cycles immediately!

My twitter handle is — what else — ironick!

When the term "electric guitar" became nearly as popular as the original unmodified word "guitar", the term "acoustic guitar" emerged because "guitar" (unmodified) was considered ambiguous. "Acoustic guitar" is labeled the retronym. What is "electric guitar" labeled?

Certainly, both "electric guitar" and "acoustic guitar" are neologisms. But I think it would be useful to have a word to denote the neologism ("electric guitar") that caused the retronym neologism to come into being. I looked around and didn’t find any such word. Before I coined one myself, I wanted to make sure that there wasn’t one already out there. So I am asking here.

BTW, if there is nothing else out there, I’m thinking of coining the word "specinym" for "specialized term." Retronyms come into being when someone puts a specialized qualifier in front of a word denoting a concept that previously did not have any "species" and then the specialized term becomes popular.

Here’s how I would use "specinym" in a sentence: "The popularization of a specinym like ‘electric guitar’ is what leads to the creation of a retronym like ‘acoustic guitar’." Got any better proposals? How about "neonym"?