I was just standing in line over at the grocery store and I noticed that they had 2GB USB flash drives on sale there at the cash register, right alongside the gum and lip balm and all the impulse-buy crap that you usually see in the grocery store checkout lane. For a moment, I was charmed by this spectacle — how unspeakably science-fiction-y and cool is that you can now get computer memory devices at the same neighborhood store where my mom used to buy me Idaho Spud candy bars in the far-off days of childhood? (Well, technically it’s not the same neighborhood store — the grocer built himself a new and improved building about fifteen years ago — but you get what I mean.) And that buying these things isn’t any big deal? They’re not down a special aisle or kept locked behind the service counter or anything, they’re just hanging there with the ChapStick, as innocuous as disposable lighters and People magazine.

But then I noticed this thing was called the JetFlash Classic. Classic? I think not. The term “classic” is something usually reserved for objects that have stood the test of time and are widely seen as the apotheosis of that category of objects. Levi’s 501s are classic. A ’57 Chevy Bel Air is a classic. But a flash drive? How long have flash drives been around anyway? Has there ever been anything that qualifies as an iconic, perfected flash drive design? No, there have been dozens of different looks for flash drives since they became widely available just a short handful of years ago, and none of them had a look that I think anyone would call definitive. They can (and do) look like anything from suppositories to humping toy dogs. And do we even know that flash drives will still be around in another five or ten years, or will something else replace them and they’re destined to end up about as classic as five-inch flop disks? How the hell can you call anything “classic” under those conditions?

You can’t. It’s all about marketing and branding. I get so tired of marketing and branding and the way perfectly good language gets warped to sell things that would probably sell just fine without giving them labels they haven’t earned. Words matter, but people don’t believe they do… and that makes me sigh and grumble under my breath like all the other grumpy old men who’re pissed that the world doesn’t run according to their watches…