The Rice University Neologisms Database

to use or connect to the Internet While changing the usage of a word as important as Internet might catch the viewer’s/listener’s attention, it doesn’t convince me that the company is intellectual. Instead, I see in my mind’s eye a company full of people who use AOL and argue in chat rooms rather than people who spend their time coding new extensions for Firefox’s trendy Mozilla browser. (I’m not completely sure why this word usage appears this way, but it’s probably because most technological terms are used as shibboleths to determine a person’s computer expertise, and using one incorrectly doesn’t convey technological know-how. Creating new words, on the other hand, does.) It doesn’t help their case that they advertise based on price, not features or usability: the largest line of text on their home page (http://www.peoplepc.com/) prominently flaunts “$5.47” – the price per month, at least until their promotion runs out. I suppose, however, that their slogan is still better than the out-of-date slang of “A Better Way to Surf the Web” or the frumpy “A Better Way to Get Online” would be.