The World In Black & White
Really? Really?
An almost painfully precious brown child acts all cutesy-poo in the service of selling Cheerios®, causing hundreds of thousands or even millions of folks to involuntarily emit a collective Aw-w-w-w! While at that very moment hundreds or even thousands of chimpanzees with drivers licenses are compelled to bang away at their keyboards decrying the mutt-ification of their holy land.
Yeah, it happened. This week. In the year 2013.
■
See, the brown child is the fictional issue of a white mom and black pop. It’s the first time a major advertiser has portrayed an interracial couple and its mixed-bag spawn so, natch, the defenders of the purity of this holy land must act.
Like the dicks they are.
From the Ad’s YouTube Comments Section
■
Oh well, maybe there’ll always be some subset of devolved anthropoids willing to shriek out their vitriolic psychoses on the interwebs over such ungodly romance and repro-sex. The vast majority of white America some 50 years ago would have lost control of their anal sphincters had they viewed such a commercial plopped in the middle of Petticoat Junction. Now, though, those with miscegenation-induced soiled drawers number something less than that of suburban moms sporting tramp stamps.
■
The world, thankfully [okay, sorta thankfully], has changed.
Funny, isn’t it: There are still people who believe the Earth is flat. And that brown children are evidence that humanity’s on a fast track to hell.
▲
Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
It’s also funny how the meanings of words change. Remember when the word bad was re-jiggered to mean good?
[If you do, you are indeed the oldest of farts.]
Oops, Bad Example
■
The computer geek world has seen its share of examples of contranyms and other redefinition types. Here are two:
◗ App — Originally a contraction for application. That is, a computer program. So Aldus PageMaker way back in 1986 was referred to as an app. Which is funny because, for MacIntosh computers at least, PageMaker took up four entire 3¼” diskettes, the equivalent today, I suppose, of a program requiring a bajillion flash drives.
Which is ironic because today app means applet, a teensy-tiny little sub-program that is dependent upon a larger application to work.
◗ Hacker/Hacking — A hacker, many revolutions around the sun ago, was anyone who was knowledgeable and competent in computer programming and languages. So, both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were — swear to god — hackers. Even today, some professional computer geeks still tell each other that they’ll get right on that hacking job as soon as they finish billing that sunglasses kiosk in the mall for building their new site.
Bad
■
Which brings me to the single most egregious example of contranym-ism, this from the world of politics:
◗ Special interests — When I was young, young, young and just becoming familiar with the heroes and villains of the geo-political universe [i.e. Daniel Ellsberg and Henry Kissinger, respectively] special interests were big, evil, bloated corporations who threw money around Washington so that pols could make laws allowing them to spew cyanide into forest streams and belch black smoke into our pristine air. Now, of course, special interests are women, non-whites, homosexuals, and other souls looking to destroy the rights of the rest of us to loathe, shun, and oppress our fellow countrymen with impunity.
Like I sez, the world, she’s a changin’.
▲
Changes
▲