sunday august 17

today i wrestled with the following trivia question, paraphrased to the best of my recollection:

this word represents:
1. a company that was founded in 1984 and initially produced laserdiscs
2. a standard for making a judgment or a decision."

after a few minutes of consideration, we had no good ideas, and someone else on my trivia team just wrote down an answer. although i didn't have a better one, i figured there was no way his answer could possibly right, and said "i'm not sure that word meets either criteria." "did you say criterion?" he asked, and while i initially thought he was just rightly correcting my misuse of the plural, i quickly realized that "criterion" - as he was pointing out - was actually a pretty good answer to the question, and turned out to be the right one.