Headlines to confuse time travelers
Just saw this headline:
77 Percent of Android Devices Running Eclair, Froyo
And I wondered: if a time traveler from fifty or a hundred years ago saw that headline, what sort of picture of today's world would it give them? Assuming they could make any sense out of it at all?
The word “android” has been around for a while, so presumably they would think we had actual androids. They would know what an eclair was, of course, but not fro-yo; and even if they did, they would likely have a hard time figuring out what it would mean for an android—or an “android device,” whatever that is—to “run” desserts.
For that matter, probably a huge number of modern people have no idea what that last phrase means; Eclair and Froyo are the code names for the latest versions of the operating system that runs Android cell phones. So perhaps this isn't the best possible example of the kind of headline I'm talking about, since it might be nearly as confusing to most modern people as to our time traveler.
But now I'm intrigued by the general idea. Got any other examples of headlines that would leave time travelers with very misleading (and/or just plain confusing) ideas of what the modern world is like?
