[Ads-l] Nouning of "interactive"?

[James Eric Lawson]

Yeah. For what it's worth, 'interactives' in a similar sense (the 
referents have changed with technological advances) appears in COCA,

https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/

as early as 1993. To indulge my laziness, I only searched for the plural 
form.

An example of 'interactives':

"We could... We could watch a movie. You like movies? I got some great 
interactives. No movies. Okay."

Source Series: SeaQuest 2032  (IMDB)  (Years: 1993–1996: 57 episodes)
Episode: Give Me Liberte  (1993) (IMDB)  (Open Subtitles)

Another example, from 1995:

"More than 500 actual specimens and a few casts help bring to life the 
sciences of paleontology, biology, and geology, as do numerous touchable 
specimens, videos, computer interactives, and dioramas, as well as the 
enviroramas."

Source 	ACAD: Science Activities
Date 	1995 (Fall)
Publication information: Fall95, Vol. 32 Issue 3, p4, 4p, 5bw
Title 	News notes.


'Creatives' appears at least as early as 1994 in academic jargon use. 
Here "Creatives" is used as a label for a set of gifted secondary school 
students.

"In this case, the question - " What gives you the greatest pleasure? " 
- had been designed simply as a relaxing way of rounding off an 
interview of some hours. But the responses were so distinct that it was 
possible to make a comparative study between those who chose measurable 
achievement as their greatest pleasure the Achievers - and those who 
took their greatest pleasure from creativity -the Creatives. This simple 
question proved to be an important indicator of outlook and motivation, 
which could be measured against such matters as scholastic success. It 
was not just a matter of the young people's pleasure in creativity, but 
that they were in fact active in those areas which gave them the 
greatest pleasure."

Source 	ACAD: Roeper Review
Date 	1994 (Sep)
Publication information: Sep94, Vol. 17 Issue 1, p15, 5p
Title 	Gifted school performance and creativity.
Author 	Freeman, Joan

By 1995, 'creatives' in the contemporary sense shows up in the data:

"When DiSesa, 48, joined McCann's New York office as its first female 
creative head last fall, she broke up one of Madison Avenue's most 
entrenched Irish old boys' clubs. She now oversees 74 creatives at 
McCann New York."

Source 	NEWS: USA Today
Date 	1995 (19950612)
Publication information: MONEY
Title 	THE DIVAS OF MADISON AVENUE
Author 	Melanie Wells


On 5/19/24 20:07, Randy Alexander wrote:
> I'm pretty sure I've seen this usage in pre-internet CD-ROM days (1990's).
> 
> On Thu, May 16, 2024, 02:48 Stanton McCandlish <smccandlish at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Stanton McCandlish <smccandlish at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject:      Nouning of "interactive"?
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> In today's news:
>>
>> "If you explore our interactive, you'll see that different racial groups
>> experience different levels of gun violence." =E2=80=94 Robert Gebeloff;
>> "M=
>> apping
>> Gun Violence"; *The New York Times*; 2024-05-15; "The Morning" column;
>> https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/15/briefing/gun-violence-united-states.html
>>
>> Here, "explore our interactive" is a link to a web app that presents an
>> interactive map. (Kinda wish I hadn't looked at it; as I suspected, I live
>> right on the cusp of one of Oakland's hot zones.) I suspect this was
>> intentional, since this was released over 8 hours ago, and the same phrase
>> appears in the corresponding email article (which differs from the web one
>> in various ways, but not at that spot).
>>
>> This might just be a typo (a missing word such as "map"), or it may be a
>> deliberate development from the nouning of "creative". The latter has been
>> used since at least the mid-1990s as a mass noun (rather confusingly to
>> anyone not within a particular industry sector) meaning 'creative content
>> such as illustrations', as in: "My big contractor gig had me producing a
>> lot of creative for *Salon* and other major sites." There's also a
>> count-noun usage of "creative", in the same business environment, meaning
>> 'those responsible for creative in the mass-noun sense': "The website
>> overhaul meeting was one long conflict between the creatives and the
>> bean-counters in marketing."
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
> 
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-- 
James Eric Lawson

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