The fearsome internet meme has been around long enough that it can be used and dropped quite quickly, and without summoning up the entire concept. An example comes from this Ohio local newspaper article on a terrifying new development.
There's the headline:
Hi-tech equipment invades schools
Then the opening lines:
MOUNT VERNON — 21st-century technology is invading local school districts.
With such a lead-in, the reader might expect a scary thing to appear. The next sentence appropriately reveals the awesome thing:
One example is an electronic, interactive whiteboard
And that's it. That's the scary thing. Which it isn't, it turns out, as the rest of the article shifts gears into a pretty straightforward, fairly cheerful description of whiteboard implementation in local schools. No more fearsome internet in the rest of the article.
The trick, of course, is the old flexibility in the term "invasion." Like the 1960s "British invasion" of the colonies, it's a jokey way of talking about the arrival of a new thing.
(thanks to Alison Furlong via Facebook; photo from mrpbps)
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