I make it a regular point to read the Times Tech Section, which appears every Thursday, the same day Apple posts a new free App on the App Store. Thursday must be a day favored by the tech gods.
Anyway, today it took a while for me to decide that today's column by Farhad Manjoo was not a belated April Fools Day edition:
I just spent more than a week experiencing Soylent, the most joyless new technology to hit the world since we first laid eyes on MS-DOS.
Soylent is a drink mix invented by a group of engineers who harbor ambitions of shaking up the global food business. Robert Rhinehart, the 25-year-old co-founder and chief executive of the firm selling the drink, hit upon the idea when he found himself spending too much time and money searching for nutritious meals while he was working on a wireless-tech start-up in San Francisco. Using a process Mr. Rhinehart calls “scientific,” the firm claims to have mixed a cornucopia of supplements to form a technologically novel food that offers the complete set of nutrients the human body needs for survival.
via the New York Times.
I took to my dictionaries. Could the term soylent have a generic meaning without reference to the Soylent Green featured in the movie of the same name? That substance, in case you missed the movie, consisted of reconstituted human bodies, fed to an unsuspecting populace in a dystopian future.
The answer is no, at least according to the Oxford English (Shorter) and the Merriam Webster dictionaries, as well as the Wolfram app that searches a number of databases. (I have not yet determined if it is accepted on Words with Friends)
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think the folks at Soylent really ought to give that moniker a re-think. There may have been worst product names in history, but the ones I've heard of usually involve a made up word that happens to be an offensive word in another language. This choice appears to have been deliberate.
Should this product fail, and I believe it will, I would really urge the folks at Soylent to offer their services to the Republican National Committee. I mean, we Democrats can use all the help we can get.
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