{"id":492,"date":"2012-10-27T16:23:58","date_gmt":"2012-10-27T23:23:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/?p=492"},"modified":"2015-12-07T20:02:44","modified_gmt":"2015-12-08T04:02:44","slug":"thats-so-twencen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/2012\/10\/27\/thats-so-twencen\/","title":{"rendered":"“That’s So… TwenCen”"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago, on my way to work, my attention was caught by the SF Examiner<\/cite>‘s headline, about a local political scandal. It seemed like something out of The Front Page<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Alternative weeklies still seem to have a place (though I can’t put my finger on why), but I suddenly looked at the institution of the hard-copy, daily newspaper and thought of Clark Kent in the ’50s, of the heyday of printed journalism, and thought: “That’s so Twentieth-Century”.<\/p>\n

Okay, not to toot my own horn, but I actually thought, “That’s so TwenCen<\/em>” — a term I picked up from some sci-fi novel or other. I’m not really sure which one, but it was definitely not<\/em> Gregory Benford’s The Sunburn<\/cite>, as cited in a WordReference forum post<\/a> — I haven’t read that novel, so the term must be in use by at least one other sci-fi work. And of course, BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow has picked up on it<\/a> (hell, it might be one of his books that introduced me to the term in the first place).<\/p>\n

Which just shows that we really do need a term<\/strong> for “the Twentieth Century — viewed as an antiquated, passe and unfashionable time”. A few other possibilities:<\/p>\n