[Info-vax] Learning VMS application programming

[Phillip Helbig---undress to reply]

In article <bahudb-tj62.ln1 at news.chingola.ch>, Paul Sture
<nospam at sture.ch> writes: 

> "HIRING PRO TIP: Hippies are not the same as hipsters.  I have made this
> mistake and we now have a frontend MVC framework written in FORTRAN."

I'll put myself in the "hippie" camp (even though I have my once
waist-length hair quite short now, mainly because of increasing baldness
(probably due mainly to chemotherapy); I prefer long and thick but if
the choice is between long and thin and short and thin, as it is now, I
prefer short and thin.  The beard gets better and better, though. 

> (and yes, I had to look up what "hipster" means to understand the joke
> "hipster: a person who follows the latest trends and fashions".)

That was essentially the original meaning of "hippie" as well, i.e.
someone who was hip.  But it now means the mindset of someone who was
hip in 1969.  It is often the case that a word originally has a relative
meaning, then gets associated with the corresponding group of people
soon after it appears, then takes on this mindset as an absolute
meaning.  "Liberal" in the economic sense is a good example.  It
originally was an alternative to mercantilism, but is now more
associated with fiscal "conservatives".  Or consider euphemisms:
"handicapped" replaced "crippled", until the former took on the 
connotation of the latter, and was then replaced with "special needs" or 
whatever.  Or, after a long chain of new euphemisms, "bathroom" 
replacing "toilet", only to be replaced by "was my hands".