Whilst waiting on a thing, I observed, “You nail polish almost matches the mousepad.” Which put a thought in my head.
Most probably we have done this kind of exercise before here. I got into my tardis, went back to my high school and asked my young classmates, “What is a ‘mousepad’? Hint: it is not what you think,” and surreptitiously recorded what they said, to see how far afield their responses fell. (I lost the μSD card that was in my phone, so I am not able to accurately report the results. But, damn, it was hard avoiding the temporal anomaly that meeting my young self would have caused.)
I also tried “vaping” and “Latte”, with mixed results.
Obviously, there is a wealth of computer/electronic jargon (just 20ya, “facebook” would have been puzzling) and hashed-up words like “Xanax” and “Veyron” that would be totally opaque to dwellers of the distant past but are fairly common today. I am interested in trying out some reasonably parseable words in the vein of “mousepad”, but preferably not computer-related, the mean something completely different from what my young classmates would expect (or yours, if you tell me where to go).
Anyone who’s gone to college will “know” that’s one of those emergency phones on and near campus. It’s a box (no phone handset) and you call the police on it.
Not sure what’s “hashed-up” about “Veyron”. Motorsports fans from decades past would probably be excited to learn that someone in the future had decided to honor Pierre Veyron by naming a car after him.
