Online Behaviors Offline

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant. This is Lisa from Indianapolis.

Hiya, Lisa. How are you?

Hello, Lisa. What’s going on?

I’m doing well. I’ve got a proposal for you.

I’d like to invite you to invent a word to help me out with something.

Oh, great! We love this.

It’s a very strange feeling that I’ve had, and maybe you can relate to it.

I have a couple of examples.

So I’m online fairly often,

And when I’m offline using a pen and a piece of paper,

Like if I’m writing my grocery list,

Maybe I come to the word broccoli,

Which I never remember if it has two C’s or two L’s or whatever.

I write the word and I have this feeling

That auto spell check is going to underline it in red

And then I can find out what the actual spelling is.

Of course, you know, I’m in a paper and pen world, but I’m thinking like I’m online.

And another example is when I’m reading the newspaper,

And I have this feeling that I just looked at the end of the article,

I’ll come to a link that I should be able to click on.

For more information?

Right, right.

I don’t know if you’ve had that feeling, but I’ve talked to some others,

And they could relate.

And I thought we need a word to describe this.

Yeah, I have the undo.

I have the undo built in.

You know, on a Mac, which I’ve been using for 20 years, although I do use Windows as well, it’s Apple Z.

And it’s so ingrained to me.

I just find my left hand just doing that Apple Z, even when I’m not in front of a computer.

You mean for your life?

Like if you do something?

No, if you accidentally turn the page in a book or a newspaper or like it flips on its own and you want to go back, you just do Apple Z.

And you’re like, oh, I can’t do that.

That doesn’t work.

It doesn’t work at all.

Where are the shortcuts?

Exactly. Where are the shortcuts?

And I’ve seen this discussed online as well, and it’s almost always with stuff that’s done for us that we’re capable of doing on our own.

It’s just we’ve become used to these.

We’re spoiled.

Yeah, these shortcuts, right?

We’re spoiled, yeah.

I mean, you know, when I go into my office, which is usually a mess, I want to hit the search function button, you know, if I’m looking for something.

Actually, I would like to reboot my office and start over because it looks like a paper bomb went off in there.

I mean, wouldn’t it be great if you could Apple Z your life?

I do know of one word for this.

But it’s only very specific to what I was talking about, which is real life undo.

And people talk about this as the thing that they kind of want.

And you’ll often see people talk about making some, you know, one of those mistakes that you regret.

It’s not something that really kills you, but turning down a job that maybe you should have accepted and you realize it like a couple weeks later.

Or are being mean to somebody who didn’t really deserve it because you were in a bad mood,

And you say, I wish I had a real-life undo so I could go back and redo that situation in the way that it should have been done.

I like that.

That’s nice. That’s really good.

Well, Lisa, do you have any candidates for – have you and your friends puzzled this one out?

I only have a research paper title for it.

-oh.

Yeah. How about this?

Technological tendencies within pulp and ink habitats.

But it’s far too limiting.

I mean, you guys kind of took it into all different dimensions,

Which I really like, so I can’t make a nice acronym from that one.

I think it’s even further than that.

I mean, I think this is related to the muscle memory that athletes have

When, for example, they practice a tennis swing 100,000 times over their life

Or pitching a baseball, and they get really good at it

Because they’re doing one thing over and over.

And that’s how they can just drop into a zone when they’re in the middle of a game and not think about it.

And this is kind of what we’re talking about because all of these behaviors the three of us have described happen because we’re not really thinking about it.

They just come impulsively.

Well, Lisa, we’re going to put the call out.

We’re going to see what everyone else has to say.

Maybe they’ve got some words for us.

I know that every time we put a call out for a word for an idea, they just come pouring in.

And this sounds like the kind of thing that everybody has experienced.

Great. Great. Cool.

I like that we’re starting the conversation.

All right. Thank you for your call, Lisa.

Sure.

Thank you very much.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

But if you’ve got a term for the kind of behaviors that you do

And you try to do something offline that can only be done online,

We would love to hear it.

Give us your ideas.

The email address is words@waywordradio.org.

The phone number is 1-877-929-9673.

And the discussion form is at waywordradio.org slash discussion.