Synonymously yours

Yesterday at a meeting I heard someone say, "If you populate the synonym, you can leave everything else blank." In context, it made perfect sense. I know how to populate the synonym! I do it all the time! Well, not all the time, but several times a year during course registration season. Anyone who uses this particular online registration system quickly learns that populating the synonym is an essential skill.

Recently I received in the mail a review copy of a textbook that's just a little out of date. How can I tell? Here is a representative passage from the chapter on online research:

Don't get scared away by all the techno-jargon. The way most of these gizmos work is that you sit down at a keyboard in the library and choose from an on-screen 'menu'--a selection of choices. Each choice produces a new menu, until you narrow your search to exactly what you want. Then by pushing a button--usually marked 'print'--you print out what you see on the screen. So you leave the library with a printed 'hard copy' of the information you need...

Remember, this textbook is intended for American college students, who are unlikely to be "scared away" by such "techno-jargon" as "menu" and "hard copy." The book was published in 1996, which doesn't feel all that long ago, but its solicitous explanations of how to use the Internet as a helpful research tool feel downright quaint. "Nowadays," we're told, "even inexpensive computers come with modems, meaning you can work in the most remote locations and still have at your desk a very sophisticated reference library." Right. The book even tells us how to locate an internet service provider by looking in the yellow pages under "Internet services." The one term in this entire chapter that students might find unfamiliar is "yellow pages."

Which goes to show, I suppose, that today's techno-jargon is tomorrow's quaint throwback to a simpler time. Ah, how young and innocent we all once were, back when the yellow pages were a book and the card catalog was a great big piece of furniture! One of these days we'll be tottering around the nursing home fondly recalling that primitive time when populating the synonym was pretty hot stuff, and the young folks will pat our hands patronizingly and say, "She's raving again, poor thing."

So we'd better enjoy our opportunities to wield techno-jargon while we can. Populate that synonym--before it's too late!