Jan 9 – The Word of the Decade – Ottawa

Morning coffee in hand, and sunlight shining through the stained-glass fortress on my window, The Ottawa Citizen tells me that the word of the decade is “GOOGLE”. Wikipedia states that the name "Google" originated from a misspelling of the word "googol", some kind of a numerical formula followed by a whole bunch of zeros. The verb "to google" was added to the Merriam Webster and the Oxford English Dictionaries in 2006 and it means "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet”… don’t we often say: “Google it?” I registered my first email with hotmail over a decade ago when I was still living in Colombia and working for a small NGO where we had dial-up Internet. It is amazing how the Internet has changed our lives. Growing up, when I had to answer difficult homework questions, my “modern” tool was the phone. Once my personal encyclopedia and the Larousse dictionary failed to provide me with the answer I was looking for, my grandma had to call her friends to ask their kids if they knew what the “light blue stripe” meant of the flag of my province, or how many children had Columbus had. It often worked… those were the earliest stages of “social media”.

I was reading in an article the other day that in times of Francis Bacon, “knowledge” was power. Some researchers think that it is no longer the case as we can have access to anything we need to learn. “Knowing” things is not as valid anymore because one can easily “google” meanings and find almost any if not all answer(s).

Chosen movie: Tom ford’s A Single Man. Book: Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.

Tip of the day: when you have some time, google the expression “knowledge is power” and share what you find.

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