whitescreened

Charles C Rice cxr1086 at LOUISIANA.EDU
Thu Sep 16 21:56:43 UTC 2010


Whitescreened

Just ran across this word in a new context and it's not mentioned in the
ADS-L archives. Seems to derive from the "white screen of death", which
has a wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_screen_of_death
The term crops up frequently in iPhone discourse because the white screen
is a frequent result of program failure (when it doesn't simply freeze).

"Whitescreened" in quotation marks gets 1,350 ghits. I ran across it in a
delightful usage regarding the new Google progressive search interface.
Certain words, you know which ones, return no results in the progressive
search. A commenter referred to this as "whitescreened":

Whitescreened
Submitted by Viviane (not verified) on 9 September 2010 - 3:48pm.

I searched LESBIAN and then BISEXUAL, and got a white screen.

http://sexinthepublicsquare.org/ElizabethsBlog/instant-censorship-google-s
tyle#comment-12953

--Clai Rice

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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