Mistagged.
Wednesday, January 22nd, 2020
I’ve had social accounts that share words and pictures, and I’ve tried to be diligent about tagging them with appropriate little nuggets of text so that when others click on them, they will get to enjoy a vast collection of perfectly curated Instawhatevers or Flickapics or Twitterverbs.
Unfortunately, I’ve discovered that some people:
- Have a different idea of what a three letter acronym or a short word means when I do, or…
- Simply are sloppy with their tags, plastering the same chunk over a vast number of pictures that may or may not be relevant to anything.
They may simply be younger, hipper, or live in a very different universe than the one I inhabit. But hey, any world that I’m welcome to is better than the one I come from (thank you Steely Dan.)
Let’s start with one I tagged when I shot a distinctive pavement marking just the other day:
- ZFS. Every right-thinking computer geek knows this is a file system for (primarily) UNIX-based machines. Instagram seems to have a lot of pics related to the ‘Z Fit Studio’ which offers power weights and zumba.
- VTR. This stands for Videotape Recorder. You know, those large things that..uh..record television on videotape? The big brother to VCRs. But again Instagram seems to be burdened with a bunch of pictures of something called a Citroen C4 VTR. The VTR brand doesn’t even show up on Citroen’s Wikipedia page, but an Irish car blog says “VTR is simply a Citroen trim level, and indicates a car in the middle of the range — well-equipped, but not the most expensive version.” Yeah, well, that’s not this:
- Sohio. Ladies and gentlemen. This is the Standard Oil Company of Ohio, accept no substitutes. Sohio stations absolutely saturated the Ohio landscape in the 1960s and 1970s, until the early 80s when they were subsumed into BP Oil.
Yet, annoyingly, a country-ish band based in Ohio decided, har de har har, to call themselves ‘Sohio,’ and subsequently, a brewery in Columbus, the state capital, put out some kind of beer called Sohio Stout, both of which sound like a lawsuit waiting to happen. Thus, the Instagram tag page has all kinds of odd stuff including italian olives (!?) and hip-hop dudes and, well, it’s a mess. Please, please, think of the Sohio-seeking children. Or late-night-surfing geezers trying to reconnect with the 1970s. Please.
I’ll spare you most of the others, but suffice it to say that Penn Central is a defunct railroad, Chyron and Vidifont are two pieces of ancient TV technology to put words on the screen (NOT the lower third banners themselves!) and GVG is a brand of video switcher. They deserve their uniqueness in the tagosphere.
