Friday, July 28, 2006

The "Wayback"

I read an article by Daniel Gilbert in the International Herald Tribune (taken from the New York Times) that led me to send him the following note:

Dear Prof. Gilbert,

I enjoyed your informative and insightful article in the International Herald Tribune the other day. Along with the information on research that it contained, I especially enjoyed the image of you and your family's trips in the station wagon when you were a child. The part of that, then, that especially struck me was the expression "wayback." That's what we called that section, too, when I was growing up in the seventies. It was always fun to sit there on long car trips, in the days before child-safety seats (which I, as a father of three kids, can hardly imagine anymore). And it's nice to know that our family was not the only one to use this expression.

*

He wrote the following back:

I've now heard from about a half dozen people who used this term. We all thought we were the only ones!

*

I think we thought we were the only ones, too.

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