Text The Times.

Text The Times.

Sesame Street always had its letter and number of the day but now Google has its word and image of the day. For some ‘unknown’ reason a picture of President Trump appears when Google searches for ‘idiot’. I wonder what words would be linked to other world leaders, perhaps ‘handsome’ with Canada’s Justin Trudeau or ‘unemployed’ with Britain’s Theresa May and the use of profanities may produce a few of the world’s despots and dictators. The use of a single word to describe a person or action is too simplistic although after the latest Whitehouse office conference regarding votes and funding for the ‘wall’ some words that could be used are bombastic, unrealistic, inappropriate, argumentative and even diplomatic so long as it is accompanied by a negative. Google provides information that is meant to be unbiased although the results are influenced by commercial interests and ads as well as previous searches so the worrying thing is why are so many people linking the words Trump and Idiot. The people have spoken or at least typed. [ Editor’s Note: I thought this came and went a few months ago. Some online pranksters were intentionally messing with Google’s “ learning curve” by typing “ Donald Trump” and “ idiot” into their search bars over and over so that Google’s internal programming would begin tying the two terms together for predictive searches. And apparently it worked. I’m not sure what they hoped to gain from this, but… yay for them, I guess. I wonder what they might have accomplished otherwise with all of that time? I mean, I guess it was worth a chuckle. And, ironically, if you now type the word “ idiot” into Google, you only get stories about the story itself. “ Why typing ‘ idiot’ into the Google search bar will get you Donald Trump” and such, so it really spoils itself]

*** Southwest Airlines has now apologized to a girl whose name is ‘Abcde’. They were accused of bullying her by making fun of her name although surely the real bullies are the parents who give their children unusual names. As a retired teacher I have taught about 7,000 students over 35 years and some names have been a worry, ‘Ela with one l’, ‘Genny with a G’ and common names from other cultures such as ‘Phuoc’ which when pronounced correctly in English make calling a class roll challenging. As a person with the common name Dennis I still have to often say ‘2 ns’ so I sympathise with people who will spend their whole life having to face problems giving their name. There are plenty of reason people get picked on, as a redheaded, overweight youth I can vouch for that so we do not need to make them such an ‘individual’ that there will be further reasons to bully them.

[ Editor’s Note: Sure, name your kid whatever you want, but anyone who names their kid “ Abcde” and then is surprised that someone thinks it’s weird is just a Donald Trump… that’s funny, when I typed “ idiot” it auto- corrected. Curse you, Google! Just kidding… anyway, you can definitely decide, should it strike you as necessary, give your child a unique name. I named my oldest son “ Buzz.” No, that’s not a nickname. We named him Buzz about six months before “ Toy Story” came out ( it was his grandfather’s nickname), so he had to deal occasionally with “ Buzz Lightyear” related teases, but he’s a grown man in law school now, so it all worked out. We’ve all encountered weird name stories. You know, like “ Le- A,” pronounces “ Ledasha” because “ the dash isn’t silent,” as the joke goes. Or the twins Orangello and Lemongello, like orange jell- o and lemon jell- o. My personal real- life favorite was a mug shot I saw in the Commercial Appeal several years ago. The criminal in the story was, no joke, names “ Benadryll Rogers”]

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