A friend forwarded one of those emails that older people get that help us remember all the stuff that has happened that isn’t part of today’s lexicon. This one was about words and phrases that have gone the way of hoop skirts. I’ll share just one paragraph for my contemporaries (if any of you are that old!):
We of a certain age have been blessed to live in changeful times. For a child each new word is like a shiny toy, a toy that has no age. We at the other end of the chronological arc have the advantage of remembering there are words that once did not exist and there were words that once strutted their hour upon the earthly stage and now are heard no more, except in our collective memory. It’s one of the greatest advantage of aging. We can have archaic and eat it too.
Well, the ending is a little trite, but I’ll forgive him that.
This kind of tied into a conversation that we have been having within in the MCAA Board about some way to honor the the visionaries and the technology legends in our instrumentation industry. Some of them already have been recognized by others–if you’re into flow, Jesse Yoder has recognized Legends of Flow. We want to recognize some of the Legends of Instrumentation, though we are not sure what to call the honor in question. So we’re starting that conversation about how we do it, what we call it, what the criteria might be, who would nominate honorees, who would elect. Its something we think this industry should have to make sure that people and their achievements from yesterday and today are captured in our collective memory as we move into that era where words and ideas, people and technologies that don’t exist now will sprout up and become engines of change.
