 |  | ||||||||
Attention, BlackBerry smartphone users! | |||||||||
Word of the Day for Monday, July 26, 2010potlatch \POT-lach\, noun: A ceremony at which gifts are bestowed on the guests in a show of wealth that the guests later attempt to surpass. On social media, the potlatch takes the form of outtweeting and outsharing the field, overloading the network with fragments of oneself as users seek a ranking. I want to play around with the idea that the orgy of bonus-giving that is a way of life among Wall Street investment banks (and related institutions) is a perverse form of the potlatch, the ceremony among Northwest Coast Indians in which leaders (Big Men) give away enormous quantities of food and goods to another tribal group. Potlatch comes from the Chinook language, meaning "gift." Nearly identical words exist in the languages of various tribes of the Pacific Northwest. | |||||||||
 Words of the Day? How about words of timeless wisdom?Introducing our Quotes channel! "Life itself is a quotation." - Jorge Luis Borges | |||||||||
  Right now, a rare illness, "Prader–Willi syndrome," is one of the top Web searches. What does it mean?Every once in a while the Internet creates a mystery. Sunday evening, Prader-Willi syndrome beat out the Gulf oil spill and "Mad Men" on Google. What's going on? The short answer is that the popular TV show "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" is rerunning an episode that features a family whose child has this illness. Our focus is the definition of... | |||||||||
| |||||||||
No comments:
Post a Comment