As a ‘90’s kid and as an avid music lover, my heart sank yesterday when I heard this on the drive home, “The Oxford Dictionary is removing the word cassette tape …” Wow.
I did the research, it’s true. Other words to be removed this year are “brabble” meaning paltry noisy quarrel and “growlery” which is a private room or den.
Here’s the kicker, the words to be added to the OED: sexting, retweet, and mankini. I’ll let those soak in for a second.
Burnett, a music historian in Dallas is protesting this, “That settles it! I’m going to ban the Oxford Dictionary from the museum. I have a copy and I’m going to recycle it!”
He also asked Huffington Post reporter sarcastically if they were going to remove the word “moon.” “…Nobody uses the damn moon anymore, not even NASA.”
Are we all familiar with the cassette tape? Let’s give a brief history lesson just in case. “The cassette is a magnetic tape sound recording format that is slightly bigger than a credit card (and much thicker). It was introduced in 1963 and it made home recording much more available than before,” as stated by The Huffington Post.
Not only could you listen to music on this device, but make “mix tapes” and even record yourself. (Which, of course I did quite often as a kid.)
This brought on the rise of portable boomboxes, and the Walkman. 
HuffPost then interviewed Lyle Owerko, a photographer who has written on the history of boomboxes. Owerko noted that since the world is still using the common phrasing of “fast-forward,” “pause” and of course “mixtape” the OED could be “beating a dead horse before the horse is actually dead.”
I really enjoyed this quote by Owerko, “Eliminating ‘cassette tape’ from the Oxford dictionary is like prematurely announcing the demise of the penny as a monetary instrument just because of online banking… or the fountain pen being blotted out of history due to the ubiquity of keyboards, texting and touch screens.”
I for one will be sad to see this word disappear. I remember my first cassette tape, The Spice Girls. Using a pencil to wind the tape when it got loose, recording myself on my mini-portable cassette tape player singing along like a rock star.
Images: www.copycatsmedia.files.wordpress.com, http://wesp1.blogspot.com/2010/10/sony-walkman-rip.html
The video below discusses the Senate version of the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). In the Senate the bill is called the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). SOPA has gotten more attention than PIPA because it was moving faster in the legislative process. But PIPA is just as dangerous, and now it is moving faster.
Sometimes elaborate tactics aren’t required to stimulate a viral response; all it takes is one great idea. Ad agency McKinney’s idea was to take holiday ecards to a new level by putting an employee inside a giant inflatable snow globe for four days and broadcasting it on a microsite 24 hours a day. Visitors could receive “season’s greetings” from Snowglobe Boy and chat with him.
Paranormal Activity had an opening budget of only $10,000 and many theatres nationwide were unwilling to work with this budget to promote the new movie.
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