The Sibilant Snark

When President of the United States, George W. Bush called the internet "the internets" many of us giggled.

No.

We did more than that.

Much like when many of us cloyingly mocked a little one in curls who lost her Kitty Karry-all, we adopted the President’s language and adapted "the internets" in the smug little way that bloggers tend to do from time to time.

"Aren't we smart?" we thought.

Well, dears, I hate to tell you, but the internets, they are a comin’.

This story reveals the future of the internets to come.

Just like the break of AT&T into five Baby Bells, which are now running wild on a open-ended telephony, it is equally possible that the Internet could experience a major break-up and a similar fast-track ride to global independence. Just like the telephony privatization process and the introduction of various splits, there would be dozens of different types of internets, each addressing its own marketing and communication goals.

Perhaps we were wrong to mock the President for his tendency to pluralize.

Perhaps when the President spoke of “the internets” the President just misspoke -- in the future tense?

History suggests that he does have a tendency to do that. After all, when the President claimed that he would seek retaliation against the Saudi Arabian terrorists responsible for three separate acts of terrorism and destroy arsenals of Weapons of Mass Destruction in the process, the United States instead bombed innocent civilians in Iraq and discovered Weapons of Mass Destruction didn’t exist at all.

That’s a classic example of mis-speaking the future, if I’ve ever heard one.

Thindy Brady couldn’t have said it better herself: Sometimes the past is just as mys(th)erious as the future.

But Cindy, after all, found what she was looking for.