When an F.B.I. official spoke at length about I.E.D.'s, he was referring to improvised explosive devices, but to the engineers the abbreviation meant intelligent electronic devices.
Paul Sagan, president of Akamai, which means "intelligent and clever" in Hawaiian, bet his sales staff members last year that they could not sign up 200 clients by Dec. 31.
For Internet marketers, a group in which Goldstein claims early membership, it means intelligent lead-generation – knowing who views what and for how long.
For users, meanwhile, attention means intelligent time management, knowing when to close the laptop and talk to your family, and when to tackle the 200 e-mails in your inbox.
That, of course, meant intelligent life and it formed the inspiration for countless science-fiction stories, from H. G. Wells's masterpiece "The War of the Worlds" onwards.The first spacecraft to visit Mars put an end to the idea that there is liquid water or, indeed, intelligent life on the planet (although there is ice at the poles).
It also means intelligent dressing for your proportions: "Not that Gok Wan thing where you just shove a belt on everyone, but drawing attention to your better parts – wear a three-quarter-length sleeve rather than a long one, scoop the neckline lower, and then you can discreetly hide your least favourite parts".
That meant intelligent hashtags and topics were less likely to reach the volume necessary to break into the Trending Topics list.
Some famous textbook examples of this category of ideograms are ming, which combines the pictures of the sun 日 and moon 月together to signify the Chinese word for "bright", 明 (as with English, it also means "intelligent").
Besides the two young American journalists released by the North Korean Dictator Kim Jong-il, the biggest winner in Bill Clinton's mission to Pyongyang was the weird and reclusive dictator, who just days ago called Bill's wife, Hillary, "a pensioner going shopping" and "by no means intelligent".
