From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Sat Jul 12 2003 - 15:26:06 MDT
It's an unfortunate word choice. "Bright" already has a well-defined
meaning in online circles, based on Mark Clifton's short story "Star
Bright" (sometimes referred to as "Star, Bright"). The narrator's
brilliant little girl, Star, categorizes humanity into three groups:
Stupids, ordinary humans; Tweens, geniuses like her father; and Brights,
the super-geniuses like herself and her six year old friend. The children
discover how to bend spacetime with their minds and travel throughout
time and space, among other things.
The words have made it into the Jargon File (a widely-referenced
dictionary of "hacker" terms) under "stupids", e.g.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=stupids.
It seems to me that Star's coinage of Brights makes a lot more sense
than Dennett's, too.
Hal
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Jul 12 2003 - 15:37:36 MDT