GM means food that is Genetically Modified. (Class of 2017, #3)

Having a chat has seldom involved talking. (Class of 2017, #8)

Gaga has never been baby talk. (Class of 2017, #9)

Plasma has never been just a bodily fluid. (Class of 2017, #19)

Java has never been just a cup of coffee. (Class of 2017, #29)

A Wiki has always been a cooperative web application rather than a shuttle bus in Hawaii. (Class of 2017, #50)

“Words developing new meanings” is one of the Mindset List’s favorite tropes as these six items from the Class of 2017 list demonstrate. In fact, a word developing a new meaning is ipso facto a cultural touchstone regardless of the actual importance of the thing the word means.

Plasma is a flat panel display technology that was invented in 1964 at the University of Illinois, used to make big screen TVs in the mid-1990s, overtaken  by LCD technology in the 2000s, and apparently soon to be phased out of production. Java is a software platform/computer language. Members of the Class of 2017 may have watched a plasma TV or used a Java application, but they don’t have to be familiar with the terms. If these technologies hadn’t been invented, we’d be doing the same things with some similar technology. Their Mindset noteworthiness (over dozens of other electronic technologies popularized in the mid-1990s) is that they are named using words that also mean something else.

The item about “Gaga” relies on the Mindset conceit that new meanings of words crowd out old ones. The existence of the entertainer Lady Gaga (née Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta) means that young people can’t conceive that “gaga” could also be used to stand for stereotypical baby talk. (Or in Mindset argot, gaga has never been baby talk.)

(It would be interesting to know if there is any pattern to which new meanings, like “plasma” and “java,” render older meanings “never just” and which new meanings cause older meanings to “never have existed”.)

Similarly “chat” isn’t used to refer to talking anymore. (Or maybe Messrs. Nief & McBride believe that young people are no longer interested in speaking in person. Cf. Class of 2017 item #45 [“They have never really needed to go to their friend’s house so they could study together.”])

Wikis, especially Wikipedia, is one of those rare Mindset List items that may actually belong on a list of cultural touchstones, but its significance has nothing to do with the earlier use of the term as a Hawaiian shuttle bus. Similarly, the significance of genetically modified food has nothing to do with its abbreviation.