Dictionary of the Future: The Words, Terms and Trends That Define the Way We'll Live, Work and Talk

I'm a dictionary junkie, especially those that delve into etymologies and usages. Who better to compile a speculative dictionary of terms on the edge of societal evolution than Popcorn -- whose name I've always loved. As a marketing guru, she has a pretty good record -- not perfect, but good -- of identifying up-and-coming trends; _The Popcorn Report_, now more than a decade old, is still a valuable look at a likely future. And there are any number of interesting trends identified in this volume -- like "wind farms" and "the death divide" and "starter castles" -- that have solidified just in the past few years. Though the actual pop phrases may have turned out differently, like "McMansions" instead of the third example above. Still, this book isn't as fascinating as it ought to be. It's rather dry and nerveless with very little of Popcorn's usual brio.

The amazing thing about this book, and for that matter any book written by Faith Popcorn, is that she has somehow managed to successfully wring a career out of writing down any ridiculous thought that comes into her head and then compiling those ideas into a book and trying to fabricate legitimacy by asserting with pseudo-certainty that these things WILL happen. I believe her secret is that, along with all of her hare-brained ideas, she always throws in a few ideas that, while still somewhat in their infancy, have nevertheless already presented themselves and been written about. Thus she creates the illusion of correctly "predicting" trends. I have to give her credit though for being shrewd. As I said, she has managed to create her own little niche and built her "trend spotter, future predictor" house of cards on the fact that she has written books about them, so she MUST be an expert. I consider the woman a joke, but then again, she gets the last laugh all the way to the bank.

To keep it current this book would have made a better ongoing periodical. Popcorn must reside in a bubble, many of these terms and phrases were created out of whole cloth and just plain silly. I doubt the library will even carry this book as it will be outdated in short order.

I really did enjoy this and decided not to sell this book, it's a definite keeper. There is considerable more here than future jargon, substantial details are included of our immediate future workings based on superior foresight of current conditions. Yes, read this book, it will give you added delivery in your chat when the time comes.
If you are truly interested in future workings with this well balanced humor and realism read a phenom, Karl Mark Maddox's SB 1 or God.

I suspect some of these reviewers gave themselves five stars for finishing the book. I don't know how one reviews this collection of terms. All I can say is here is a mixed bag of terms, half of which should never have survived the cut. Way too many are already in current usage, (e.g., lucid dreaming, mother-of-all, rage, brownfields), way too many will never become generally used because they are nearly unpronounceable (e.g., participlaytion, bacterroria), others add nothing to existing terminology (e.g., boatominiums or floatominiums for house boats; relationshopping for relation shopping or relationship shopping--Is one very long word better than two short ones?) and there are far too many compounds, words strung together arbitrarily (e.g., socially irresponsible investing, self unfulfilling prophecies, driving Miss Daisy syndrome). Are they patronizing the reader?

I would like to have seen the www.web sites included in the index--there were at least fifty of them relied on and cited. In fact, if the truth were known, the internet was the principal source of half of the thousand terms listed. I would have liked to see the list cut in half, using only the most interesting terms (actual new terms, not those just abbreviated or strung together). Also the authors organized the words into 35 idiosyncratic chapters (e.g., Figures of Speech; Fear, Frustration & Desire; New Behaviors). I would have liked to see half that number of Chapters (e.g., ego surfing was placed in New Behaviors instead of in Internet or Computers. Three sections: Computers, Internet and Technology might have been combined into one).

As to the sections that tried to predict which new terms might catch on--really only a useless guessing game. These sections added very little to the book (e.g., fashion will become fash just as glamour has become glam is no doubt inevitable since both www.....com and www.....com are URL domain names now for sale on the internet). Dropping the last 3 letters to a word merely indicates how lazy some internet users are becoming. There is nothing new in knowing that.