Jurassic Park has always had rides and snack bars, not free-range triceratops and velociraptors. (Class of 2017, #26)

Here’s another example of a “words develop new meanings” item that makes little sense.

Jurassic Park is a 1990 novel by Michael Crichton. A Steven Spielberg movie of the same name was released in 1993. A sequel to the book, The Lost World, was published in 1995, the year when much of the Class of 2017 was born. That book became a movie in 1997. A third movie came out in 2001. A 3D version of the first movie was re-released in 2013 and a fourth movie is planned for 2015.

Jurassic Park: The Ride at Universal Studios Hollywood opened in 1996 with other versions opening later in Japan, Florida and Singapore.

There have also been Jurassic Park comic books, video games and toys.

There are two obvious directions for the BML to take regarding Jurassic Park. First, Jurassic Park has always existed for the Class of 2017 (since they can’t remember a time when it didn’t exist). Second, Jurassic Park never existed (or at least is not important) for the Class of 2017 (since it came out while they were babies).

As evidence that either approach would work, we can look just one year back when the Class of 2016 list used one approach for The Santa Clause and another for Pulp Fiction even though both movies were released during the same year:

There has always been a Santa Clause. (Class of 2016, #53)
Pulp Fiction’s meal of a “Royale with Cheese” and an “Amos and Andy milkshake” has little or no resonance with them. (Class of 2016, #69)

(See more about this contradiction here.)

Instead, the BML goes in a third direction, suggesting that the Class of 2017 can recall the ride but not the premise of the movie or book, i.e., “Jurassic Park“ has a new meaning.

Ron Nief, one half of the Beloit Mindset List brain trust, is a Beloit College P.R. guy so it’s bizarre that this item seems drafted by someone with a complete misunderstanding of how marketing works. Jurassic Park is a media franchise with multiple products that increase awareness of each other. You might as well claim that “Beloit College is ‘a poorly written compendium of trivia, stereotypes and lazy generalizations,’ not an institution of higher education.”

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.