Look it Up!

Everyone thinks the the "look it up" mentality is a phenomenon. What I am referring to here is the idea that any time anyone is clueless about a certain piece of information, we immediately go to the internet to..well.."look it up." We have turned Google into a verb as well as IMDB (despite the clunky sound). With iPhones, smartphones, and even most pre-paid "cheap" phones, we have access to limitless amounts of information.

This concept is not new, not if you were raised like I was. Despite my family's modest means, we always manged to have access to dictionaries, thesauruses, and encyclopedias. Whenever I came upon information I didn't know, which was usually vocabulary, I would ask my mom who in turn would tell me to "Look it up."

In case you were thinking they were digital

After I got older, I began to believe that this response was because she was too prideful to admit that she didn't know the answer. After I looked a word up without asking her, I would drop the word into normal conversation to see if she looked confused. She never did.

The older I get the more I realize how much smarter my mother is than I am. All the time I spent trying to exploit why she made me look things up for myself was time spent learning vocabulary and history. It also taught me how to learn things for myself and even self-teach to some extent.

Some people say that the internet is making us stupid, and there may be logic to that, but I cannot help but wonder if those of us who love to "look it up" had folk who pushed us to always know more.