techno-ish

When my youngest daughter was around 6-8 yrs old, we'll say 7 ish, I asked her to be home from a friend's house by 5 ish. She asked, "Mom, which side of the 5 is the "ish" on?"  Of course, I cracked up while at the same time seeing this as evidence that she was a true linguistic genius, as are all my daughters. I've never forgotten her return because through the years it has become plain that the suffix--if we can call it that officially--"ish" can be considered a true language phenomenon.
     For instance, some people have an enormous amount of technological prowess. How did Facebook ever come to be? Who accomplishes that wondrous hacking into emails and private databases of world reknown corporations, individual government agencies, and for that matter, individual computer systems? How do they do that? Julian Assange should be carried into the city upon a royal palanquin as a hero (just an aside). And really, how did it come to be that untold hundreds of millions of "bits" of information can be saved on the tiniest of little square pieces that fit into the tiniest of computer bodies and be available in seconds with the tap of a finger. Well, those people and those kinds of technological knowledges do not qualify for "ishes."
     Who does qualify are we who think of technology as something useful to our daily lives and who know more about it than we give ourselves credit for--this lack of self credit being mainly because the people who flaunt technically-supreme knowledge and spit-fire skill leave us cowering in a corner, or try to. Yes, so many of us can be called "techno-ish" because we merely use technology. We can flitter (not twitter) through Microsoft Word--manuevering mundane thoughts into sheer brillancy by being masters of the delete, paste, cut, and copy functions. Or we have found many of the nuances built into email formats and internet searches and google books and google scholar and blogspot and news sources and . . . . . We also are more respectful of the not-so-obvious technology, i.e., that having to do with the history of modern day--before computers. How could life have progressed beyond the cave without wheels, scissors, knives, paper clips, and zippers! Yes, we techno-ishes have our feet on the ground and are not embarrassed that we don't know--or care--about coding for the internet or the mysteries of spending hours and days learning how to save time. It's all in the "ish."