You would be forgiven for thinking that the sky had fallen in with all the whoop-dee-doo the media made over today’s Twitter 1 hour crash.
Well, I’m a bit surprised and bit not – ‘Selfie’ originates from Australia!
According to the Oxford dictionary, which has now put its definition onto their online website (“A photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to social media website”), the first documented version of a selfie appeared in an online ABC forum.
A drunk (must be Australian clue #1) wrote
“Um, drunk at a mates 21st, I tripped ofer [sic] and landed lip first (with front teeth coming a very close second) on a set of steps. I had a hole about 1cm long right through my bottom lip. And sorry about the focus, it was a selfie.”
The fact that it ends in ‘ie’ rather than ‘y’ is a second clue lending towards an Australian origin. Apparently we like to end words in ‘ie’ to make things more endearing and in this case, turning a possible narcassitic action into something cute and fun.
And final supporting argument, even our former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd helped to promote the expression, by sharing selfie pictures of himself while shmoozing the public.
Stumbled upon the Worldometer website when researching how many people lived on planet earth for this cartoon. Watching the number change before your very eyes is quite mesmerising, but I digress. A few interesting stats presented on the site include:
- the population currently alive represents roughly 6% of all people who have ever lived on planet Earth.
- an estimated 106 billion people have been born since the birth of the homo sapiens
- the world population is currently growing at a rate of around 1.10% per year (a decline since the 1960’s which peaked at 2%)
Nothing!
But congratulations to Harold, the winner of the August Name the Evil Pink Aliens Competition with his winning names of Grumble and Grudge. And because we like to break the rules here, we’ve decided to have a second winner as well with facelikeafryingpan.wordpress.com coming in as our winner of the middle names for our evil pink aliens with Hank and Chester.
Check out the other notable entries and see why the judges found it so hard to decide.
And for today’s cartoon, check out below.
