Digicide

if you need a new cingular phone in the mean time, i have a barely used lg (it’s even black) although not as cool as your 8125…but it can get you by…and it would be free :) just let me know.

i, of course, would charge you $520 shipping and handling.

that would solve both of our dilemmas.

:)

you are “Mr Techy”

I feel empathy for you, Matt; but on the upside, I found this fun and interesting because it demonstrates how in our culture even our words are being made outside of the historical systems upon which we base our languages.

In basic Webster cases, every “-cide” word I looked up has at least one definition where the word describes the agent of the killing.

Examples:
Suicide N 2 : one that commits or attempts suicide.
Homicide N 1 : a person who kills another
Herbicide N 1 : an agent used to destroy or inhibit plant growth
Deicide N 2 : the killer or destroyer of a god

So in your examples, who or what is the agent of doom – are you, Matt Singley, the Digicide?

The given definition of “digicide” doesn’t stay within the classical language boundaries in at least three ways:
(a) it demands two parameters (multiple deaths and time frame) that the other “-cides” don’t take into consideration.
(b) Life/death are given to inanimate objects.
(c) No one agent is presupposed by the definition. The Outlook is independant of the cell phone. With genocide, we know that someone like Stalin is behind the event.

So in the end, we have this word that is cute and we understand what it is saying, but is outside the way our English teachers tought us to build words.

There are so many ways to learn and teach from this. When our words lose their concreteness, we wind up hearing a President say “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the–if he–if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not–that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement….Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true.” (BTW: Had Bill Clinton been less philosophical about how to dodge questions and more ethical in the treatment of his family, Al Gore would have won the 2000 election.)

Is it not awesome to know that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God?

I enjoy your post. My comments about Clinton and Jesus muddled my point: your word “digicide” interests me because your definition is not implicitly obvious. If you say a word with the -cide ending, it’s likely I can give you an accurate definition. But, “digicide” requires contextual information I need from you to arrive at your definition. Without your framework, the word might mean “killing of video game characters” or “chopping off my finger”, but who determines that? In this case, you do.

Higher level thought: This demonstrates to me the importance of both knowing context and explaining context when sharing the joy of living for Christ. Agreed?

Well, I had the same reaction as Bill to the neologism “digicide”. (I consider it a neologism since there are other references on the web, as opposed to the one I just coined recently, “Web2.Overload”). I would imagine digicide to be something a Luddite would approve of.

@Dave: the peanuts are random. No significance at all.