Picked up a new word this morning- evanescent.
[ev-uh-nes-uhnt] Show IPA , adjective - 1.vanishing;fading away;fleeting, 2. tending to become imperceptible
More importantly, I found it in an article by Frank Bruni in The New York Times, Our Hard Drives, Ourselves. The article is must reading for anyone who has ever written an e-mail, a blog or commented on the Internet. More so for anyone who tweets or indulges himself with a Facebook page. Here’s a sampling of the article:
Major scandals, minor news stories and the plots of police procedurals remind us, time and again, that the seemingly evanescent communications through our smartphones, tablets, laptops (how presciently named!) and personal computers aren’t evanescent at all. They live on, float around and can be reeled in by a lawyer with a subpoena, a hacker with an agenda or a run-of-the-mill technician just letting his curiosity get the better of him.
Other than heeding Mr. Bruni’s warnings, my current challenge is to find a good use of “evanescent”. Hitting the delete button would do it, but this post is rather tame. Come to think of it my blogging may be evanescent. My local newspaper borders on becoming evanescent. I wish the far right would become evanescent. I'd be ecstatic if war became evanescent. This post is not evanescent but it is definitely finished.
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