QW 032412 “Etch A Sketch”

While reading several online articles related to the issues on the American presidential election 2012 for the past two days, I kept encountering this word, “Etch A Sketch”. It was when I was watching PBS Newshour Analysis this morning that I finally started researching what that word really means. I should’ve done so when I first knew the word, but I didn’t. One; I tried inferring the meaning from the context (good try, but half-assed job). Two; I just avoided the trouble of looking the word up (same old lazy me). Three: I thought I just can ignore the word guessing the word isn’t commonly used (but it is).

The omnipotent Wikipedia taught me what it was. “Etch A Sketch is a mechanical drawing toy, a thick, flat gray screen in a plastic frame.”

Before running to Wiki, I searched the word in Urban Dictionary and got the following result: A girl you get with when you’re drunk, when you wake up the next day, you shake your head in shame to forget about it; e.g.) "So anything going with you and Stacy?" "No Way. Straight up Etch a Sketch" It’s a funny definition and has an impact vivid enough to learn the word.

Here’s a much more “formal” usage of Etch A Sketch taken from a CNN taken news article. : "If we are going to be a little different, we might as well stay with what we have instead of taking a risk in what may be the Etch A Sketch candidate," Santorum said. He was referring to earlier comments from a top Romney adviser, Eric Fehrnstrom, who said his campaign will "hit a reset button" to take on Obama in the fall if Romney wins the GOP nomination. He added, "It's almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up, and we start all over again."

From those instances, my understanding for Etch A Etch came to be something like that it is used as a metaphor for something that needs to, or can be, erased or reset very easily to deal with the situation. Then my spin would be, “No matter how I try, I can possibly get the guy out of my mind. It’s nothing like Etch A Sketch. I wish it were, seriously.” … Did I use the word correctly? Does the sentence have a cognitive impact for you to learn the word?

(50 minutes / 405 words)

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