In a case of grammatical form following function, the American Dialect Society voted “they”, used as a gender-neutral singular pronoun, as 2015’s word of the year. The selection may have some traditionalists clutching their pearls, but the recognition validates the singular pronoun’s utility and reflects our shifting social landscape.

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More than a few times over the past year, in the midst of going down an Internet rabbit hole, I’ve wondered what my dad would make of all this. A world of information at my fingertips; searches that beget endless questions. He still had dial-up when he died. The pixelated outer space sound would ping through his small condo while he would wait to check the messages in his AOL account.

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As they say, timing is everything. The second hand of an increasingly anachronistic analog clock ticks through each moment of our lives and stops for no one. There are the occasions where we wish we could will time to move faster and just as many that leave us wondering in dismay where it all went.

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There’s been much ado about the millennial generation for the past few years. Whether decrying the cohort’s fondness for selfies or analyzing its symbiotic relationship with mobile devices and the Internet, there’s a glut of judgments and think pieces that attempt to define the attitudes and behavior of those born between 1980 and the early 2000s.

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Social media has reinvented the phone’s pound sign, giving birth to the now ubiquitous ‘hashtag.’ If you immediately understand what I’m referring to, you have one-up on my mother. Despite the barrage of TV ads referencing the hashtag and the fact that it’s been clickable since 2009, my mom has no idea what one is or what it’s used for, and she’s content to continue living in her hashtag ignorance.

Unlike my mother, there are those who would argue that they know exactly what a hashtag is and just how to use it. My Facebook newsfeed begs to differ.

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Last week I was riding the 7 train uptown from Grand Central a few hours after the morning rush. There were no strap-hangers, but most of the seats were occupied. I couldn’t help but observe my fellow riders, the majority of whom were engaged with the small screen before them. A car full of necks craned downward might be a chiropractor’s nightmare, yet it’s a revealing snapshot of our digital age.

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It may be a familiar trope in crime stories, but having a dead body in the trunk is a lousy selling point for an automobile. When Ford launched its ad campaign in Belgium, they wanted buyers to appreciate their excellent manufacturing and came up with the slogan “Every car has a high-quality body.” However translated into Dutch, one of Belgium’s three official languages, the ad became “Every car has a high-quality corpse,” which was less than persuasive. Thanks to a translation error, Ford’s new model sounded as if it was an accessory to a crime rather than something you’d willingly drive off the lot.

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I was twenty when the overwhelming urge to head to the Southwest struck. I was a junior in college, living on a tiny island off the coast of Maine, and I was hungry to explore the alien landscape of slickrock and sandstone, to see arches and mesas and unimaginable rock formations with my own eyes. The canyons were calling to me, so in the spring of 1998, I took a Greyhound bus from Maine to Utah.

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My father was a bit of a joker when I was a kid. “They’re coming to get you!” he’d say at the sound of police sirens in the distance. I developed a Pavlovian response to law enforcement and an excessive respect for authority as a result of his chiding. A look back on all of the ways I could have rebelled but didn’t is a glimpse into my misspent youth.

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Epic fail.

Literally the best.

The most amazing.

The absolute worst.

These superlative descriptions are best reserved for, respectively, the sinking of the Titanic, invention of the wheel, the Great Pyramid of Giza and the 1918 flu pandemic.

Today, it’s hard to know where you stand when something as minor as burnt toast can be considered an epic fail, or a particularly good burger becomes literally the best thing ever. An affliction of modern discourse is our penchant for exaggeration. Having been a vegetarian for seventeen years, to me there are few foods that come close to the glory that is a nice thick juicy burger. But let’s not get carried away; I’ve had ups and downs, but my life would be pretty grim if a hunk of ground beef was literally the best thing ever.

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