Flash is the Word

The word flash is everywhere lately.  So I compiled some.

Flash as a verb; as a noun; as an adjective; as an adverb.

Older more common uses:

Flash back, flash flood, flash card, news flash. Flashings, as in metal & rubber, for doors, windows, roofs, chimneys, etc. Flash tape, often fashion tape. Flash photography (flash bulbs, flash lamps, flash units, flash umbrellas). Flashlight.  Flash tattoo, generic tattoo designs often seen on the walls of tattoo studios.

Flash Gordon: Flash Gordon is the hero of a science fiction adventure comic strip originally drawn by Alex Raymond. First published January 7, 1934. Followed by various Flash comics characters. “All incarnations of the Flash can move, think, and react at superhuman speeds. Some, notably later versions, can vibrate so fast that they can walk through walls, travel through time and can also lend and borrow speed. Furthermore, all members have an invisible aura around their bodies that prevents themselves and their clothes from being affected by air friction as they move at high speed.”

Flasher: multiple meanings but probably best known for “A person who displays his or her body in a form of indecent exposure (flashing genitals, breasts, buttocks, etc.)”.

Flash, a 1980 song for a Flash Gordon movie.

Flashdance, a 1983 romantic movie about dancing.

Flashforward: a 1999 novel and a 2009 TV series.

Flash ability: a spell in Magic the Gathering, here.

Flash drive: a flash memory data storage device.

Adobe Flash:  “is a multimedia platform used to add animation, video, and interactivity to web pages. Flash is frequently used for advertisements and games. More recently, it has been positioned as a tool for "Rich Internet Applications" ("RIAs").”  A flash player is used to view the animations.

Related to Adobe Flash

Flash animation:  a “Flash cartoon is an animated film which is created using Adobe Flash or similar animation software and often distributed in the .swf file format. The term Flash animation not only refers to the file format but to a certain kind of movement and visual style which, in many circles, is seen as simplistic or unpolished. However, with dozens of Flash animated television series, countless more Flash animated television commercials, and award-winning online shorts in circulation, Flash animation is enjoying a renaissance.  Also:  Flash ads/banners, flash effects, flash earth, Flash video, flash audio, flash cookies, flash games. Flash index, FlashQuran.  The use is endless.

Flash quizzes = quick quizzes; flash test (a school quiz or a test of the flash player.)

Flash work out = quick exercise

Flashseats, a place to buy tickets, quickly.

Flash sales:  “sales in a flash. They are excellent deals, sometimes up to 70% off but they only last for a very short period of time”.  They used to be called Blue light specials, as in K Mart.

Flash prose/literature fiction and nonfiction of under 1000 words, plays of less than ten minutes in duration, and one of several journals and magazines for it.  Also, ‘daily flash’ a dose of flash prose.

Flash report; “One providing highlights of key information promptly to the responsible managerial accountant; also called exception report. An example is an exception report such as performance reports that highlight favorable or unfavorable variances. A flash report allows managers to take a corrective action for an unfavorable variance. “

Flash mob: a group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual and sometimes seemingly pointless act for a brief time, then disperse, often for the purposes of entertainment and/or satire. Coined in 2003.

Flash volunteer, get involved with your neighborhood.

Flash crash of 2010 in the stock market.  And, subsequent usage for quick stock or market downturns.

If there are some others that are interesting,  let me know. 

A Gala of Google Ngrams (updated)

OK, so I have been working on a couple essays about modernism, but as usual I got distracted.  The Google ngrams  (here too) caught my attention this week so I had to play with them.  Here are some of the cultural periods I have been discussing based on word searches [1].  Remember, these charts reflect how popular certain words were during the selected time frame. Click on a chart to get a bigger image.

Update 01/08/11: I redid all the charts using the word eat as a base line.  Also, I added a few more charts so the gala is now more a gaggle.

In the 17^th century “age of faith” people liked the words faith, love, and heart. Certainly, a passionate era.

 

 

The 17th century was a soulful era too.  The 18th was not.

Was the 18^th century an “age of reason"? Apparently not. But they liked thought.  Reason was popular before and after the 18^th century.  I guess that spike in the very late 18th century has to do with somebody writing a book called "the age of reason".

The discussion of the Enlightenment started circa 1825. The study of romanticism began in the late 19th century and then died down. Neither seem that important compared to the basic idea of eating.

Modernity and post modern are both, well, modern and post modern. Our culture war seems so irrelevant.

 A close up of the culture war. Note the change in scale from the above chart.

 

Intuition continues to slowly build like the Old Master that it is.  Meanwhile the upstart rationality has shot its wad as the young genius that it was. Now we can focus on really understanding our world, intuitively and deeply.  Yes the Age of Intuition has really begun.

But, will intuition ever overcome our basic need of eating the way science has done?

 And people wonder why the religious folks are angry at science.  Science the usurper.

All fun aside, I remain skeptical about the Ngrams tool.  I used a similar technique for my essay on reflexive archaeology [2]; there I did word counts using Google Scholar for the word reflexive.  You must understand that words change meaning and nuance, and that when they change meanings their popularity within a culture can change significantly.  Reflexive was a special linguistic and mathematical term, then the psychologists used it, and then it became quite common among educated people.  That change happened in the 1950s-1960s when the meaning expanded to cover all types of self referential and collateral relations.

Therefore, use the Ngram tool wisely and don't take the charts at face value; dig behind the numbers to really see how words, ideas, and cultures change.  Charting a few words is the beginning of a study not the end.


Notes
1. I have used the period 1500-2008 as a base line.  The corpus is English (both Brits and American), and the smoothing is 3; non capitalized words. See here.

2.  "Toward a Still and Quiet Conscience: A Study in Reflexive Archaeology," North American Archaeologist, 2001, 27(2): 149-174.