Sciolism Rocks

I’m fixing things today. Having been a member of the JMP
group for ten years, I know well the cycles of change that software goes
through. It’s a lot of work, but the results always give me great pride.

Being a language lover, I see change there too. English is
mostly malleable and mutable, adding words to its dictionary every year. We can
form new words by tacking on common beginnings and endings: Once you know -thon, you know bike-a-thon, telethon, rock-a-thon, read-a-thon, bug-fix-a-thon, and many others. Once you know that in- means “the opposite of”, you can discern direct from indirect, fallible from infallible, and hospitable from inhospitable.*

My father can drive (slowly) down a road and do nothing but
tell me what didn’t used to be there. “See that building? It didn’t used to be there.”

Twenty yards on, again he’s “Didn’t none of that used to be there. Not from there (pointing) all the way to there (pointing
somewhere else). Didn’t used to be there.”

Another twenty yards, more great swaths of things that didn’t used to be there. Twenty more, and we’ve come to a dead stop. Dad is lost and a little confused. Not his fault, though, because he knows this road, this crosswalk, this stop light, this exit ramp. “They’ve changed this whole thing, you know.”

It sometimes startles me to realize how so many of the
things we take for granted these days are, in fact, very recent innovations. I’m not talking about television and air conditioning, clear things that were invented. Instead, think about the subject of Émile Zola’s brilliant novel Au Bonheur des
Dames. The story centers around a monstrous department store—the first of its kind in Paris—where customers could actually feel the fabric and items they were buying. A new innovation, price tags, let the customer know the price of business, giving them the ability to compare store to store. Grand department store windows, the idea of winter and summer sales, all new. Ever notice that, in order to find something in a large store, you have to walk all around, almost to the back, in order to find it? Ever find yourself traversing a store completely just to get, say, socks and shoes, two items that logically
go together? All these things were invented for the grandes surfaces and galeries of 19^th-century France.

They didn’t used to be here.