Said to be the ultimate insult uttered by Bill Gates at Microsoft meetings. Gates - most likely the richest person in the world with (or without!) Asperger Syndrome - does not accept anything less than rigorous logic, as would be required of any functional, error-free (alas, nothing put out by Microsoft) computer program. But now comes Ken Ringle, one of the Washington Post's best feature writers (Linton Weeks is another) with a wry take on youth's word du jour. From the article, in today's Post:

"We have seen the future, and it is random. We used to think it was whatever, but somewhere between the Y2K crisis, which never arrived, and the 9/11 one, which did, our lives went from whatever to random. As usual, realization of this surfaced first among social critics recently liberated from the psychic carapace of middle school [isn't he great?]."

"The brightest of the bright kids are the ones who tend to use it [the word 'random']."

"Random is the flip side of 'neat.'" (I am reminded of the memorable documentary about Madonna in which Kevin Costner, backstage after a Madonna show, meets her and tells her he thought her show was "really neat." After Costner leaves, Madonna turns to her chums and makes great fun of Costner: "Neat? He said the show was neat? Ha.")

"Random recognizes that chance is the only mechanic doing tuneups these days - on Chevys or anything else. It's a term more observational than disapproving. In fact, unlike the dismissive 'whatever,' which appears to accept chaos as the norm, 'random' suggests that whoever employs the term in its 2003 slang usage has some awareness, however dim, of a 'neat,' non-random world existing somewhere - maybe in the distant past, perhaps in another dimension."