Quote of the 'Week'

"Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all."
Voltaire
Discovering that someone has commented on one of my blogs is such a joyous feeling. Hint, bloody hint!

Saturday 24 April 2010

Ramblin'

Now, I'm not a raving, chemical-toilet kicking environmentalist or anything, but I do think that those who say that the Earth is 'part of us' have a point. A good one, at that; in this incredibly technology-dependent age, everything boils down to the effective transferral of information. In this sense, we rely quite heavily on the Earth. Right down to the words we use.

Right, let's imagine the unimaginable. We knacker the planet. I mean, properly bugger up. And not only do we have to evacuate (if we can), but the actual planet itself is destroyed somehow (I'm no scientist, but I'm sure you can find some crazed boffin with a theory so complicated and intelligent-sounding that it's completely watertight against the moronic, uninformed arguments we dribble in cynicism, about how our blatant disregard for our planet could indirectly make it explode). The planet Earth, third planet from the Sun, sixth from Pluto, ninety-seven thousandth from The Almighty Lord Our Capitalised Creator, is gone. Completely and utterly. And the thought of our lost home sends us into spirals of depression.

Say we manage to restore the internet, wherever we end up - after all, it has become the backbone of modern society. What do we replace 'www' with? The first 'w' doesn't  quite seem right. Sure, 'world' doesn't specifically mean 'Earth', but that's what you think of when you hear the word, isn't it? We won't want to hear the word 'world' all the time, because it will remind us of the incident. So that will have to go. I expect they would replace it with another word that has been known to have the suffix '-wide'.
All I can think of is 'nationwide'. The Nation Wide Web. I'll be honest, that sounds crap. Besides the point that it only refers to one group of people at any given time, it needs three identical letters; hence, 'www' worked. It was almost catchy. Well, as catchy as an acronym can be without spelling out BOLLOCKS (how about 'the Battalion Of the Loving and Listening Omnipresent, Creationist Killing Supermen', which certainly lives up to its acronym).
Furthermore, whatever word replaces 'net' in order to make the acronym consist of the same three letters should be roughly synonymous with the meaning of the original word. 'Net' was used to describe the mass of signals, criss-crossing all over, from lots and lots of different computers, like a web (hence 'web' - duh). So it should be some sort of complicated, intricate construction, preferably from the natural world.
So the template is:
1. A word to represent humanity as a whole, possibly in the possessive if we're going to be intergalactically social in the future
2. A word to demonstrate the sheer scale of the internet. The internet wasn't that big when the terminology was coined, so 'wide' initially sufficed. The destruction of the planet Earth would be a good chance to update the term to suit the massiveness of the modern internet (which, by the way, will be even bigger in the future).
3. A word to replace 'web' (see above paragraph).
Here's my idea.
'Humanity's Humongous Hive'.

There you go. Food for thought there.
Bye bye.

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