I’ve noticed a few phrases creeping into my everyday speech and am wondering if they reflect a broader trend or are specific to my little software / Web / high-tech world. These are:
- “Missing a chip” – denoting an inability to understand or process a certain kind of information, e.g., a friend and I were just marveling at how Bjork has any fans at all given her tuneless singing and annoying public persona, and my explanation was, “I guess I’m just missing a chip on that.” The analogy is drawn from computing hardware, where individual chips are often assigned to perform specific compute functions like graphics processing.
- “Flipping a bit” – indicating a change (often sudden) in opinion or understanding, from one point of view to an opposing or significantly different one. Viz. the example above, were I to wake up tomorrow with the conviction that I actually *do* like Bjork, I could be said to have “flipped a bit” on Bjork. The phrase refers to the use of binary digits to represent a logical state, where ‘1’ is the positive and ‘0’ the negative state (or vice versa).
Are these common phrases in your lexicon? Is this further evidence that the singularity is nigh? Discuss…