If someone can just explain how one minute your Google Toolbar is at the top of your screen and then with the speed of a click, it's gone. Not hidden. Not tucked away. It's gone. Where did it go? When I left my hotel room yesterday morning, the Google Toolbar was safely ensconced along with toolbar icons for my.del.icio.us, pluck, furl, skype etc.
It's as if my Google is a victim on an online kidnapping. Here's what I realized. I'm a Google girl.I have enormous brand loyalty. Having to rely on Yahoo! for my searches is unsettling,
None of this would be a big deal if I didn't run into a problem re-installing the Toolbar. Right now Spy Sweeper is doing a total system sweep and hopefully within the hour Google will be back in my browser smiling down on me.
Smiling is something that definitely didn't occur in the Used Book Store I visited on Sunday. The first thing I noticed was this sign:
BEWARE OF CAT
Petra, our orange and white cat, will sometimes scratch with little warning.
The human serving as the information guru, check out guy and one and only person working the shop was not the kind of person that made you want to return on a regular basis. Also Petra was sitting in the chair right next to him-- kind of like a guard cat.
I was hoping to find a copy of Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated and ventured up to the counter, keeping a watchful eye on the unpredictable Petra.
The human didn't bother to get out of his chair but decided to share his view on Mr. Foer's writing ability. It was a rapid fire discourse on how bad the book was --he didn't actually finish the book but instead burned it because it represented "everything wrong with the American society and it was completely solipsistic."
Later he added that no American in the past 15 years had written anything worth reading. He shared that he reads poetry.
Knowing that I would never go into this establishment again, I confessed that I had no idea what solipsistic meant (and I struggled to pronounce it)
The human spelled it for me and then said it meant self-centered.
Not exactly, if you trust Merriam-Webster vs "I only read poetry guy" Solipsism actually means "a theory holding that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing"
When I looked for synonyms, Merriam Webster Thesaurus replied, " No entries found that match solipsism."
Here's my shout out. I now feel invested in the word and would very much like to add it to my patois. Afterall, since I have now taken the time to learn how to spell and say it, I'd like to drop it into casual conversations...often. But the definition provided by Merriam Webster doesn't give me the confidence to use it as if I really own it. I want to own this word. So, I'd like to see it used in a sentence that I can understand. Perhaps there's a character in a book, movie or maybe a politician who has solipsistic characteristics. I look forward to your shares.
If I am successful with adding solipsism to my patois it will be my second new word for 2006...the first being Schadenfreude-- a word I'm absolutely delighted to know and one that seems to have caught the imagination of media pundits.
In case you are not familiar with schadenfreude it means taking delight in other's miseries.Listen up, I predict it could become as beloved by the media as their absolute love affair with "gravitas."
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