Tupperware Inc. surveyed 1,007 Americans. They found that two-thirds take their lunch to work, but only about 1/3 of those use the legendary "brown bag.%
WALLY's COMMENT: The times they are certainly aāchanging and this is as good an example of how technology works as anything else. We're in the in-between times. And what that means is that we're attaching adjectives to old things or using old terms for what are in effect new things.
We call it a brown bag lunch because people used to bring their lunch in a brown bag. In fact, even then lots of people used lunch boxes or (to use a phrase more common in my youth) lunch pails or lunch buckets. So we now refer to the brown bag lunch, even though there aren't many brown bags in evidence. Instead there are the Tupperware containers, insulated carriers and other devices.
I'm willing to bet that you've got a push-button telephone. But Iāll also bet that it has a button called "redial.%
In times of rapid change, like the one we're living through, our language doesn't change fast enough to keep up with the changes. In the early 20th century cars were called horseless carriages. That wasn't because people didn't know they were different. It was because they didn't have the language to call them something else.
Today we've got "digital books.% They sure are digital, but they're not books. We call them that because they do some of the functions that paper books do. We're also talking about "virtual organizations.% Folks, they're just organizations. The network world is the way that they do business.
That's what's behind my latest language move. I'm trying to get the folks who interview me on radio and television and for the newspapers to talk about "high tech.% "High techä isn't what we're doing anymore. What we're doing is the tech that everybody uses. So, what people like me and Terry Brock, and Bill Metcalf and others talk about isn't "high tech," it's "business tech.%
Created/Revised/Reviewed: 1999
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