The blackboards of the old school were absent from the Purlieu Street School. In their place were devices much like them—extensive flat things mounted on the walls, meant for writing—but these were green. What were we supposed to call them? Greenboards? Green blackboards? Why had this change come about? The official explanation was that yellow chalk on a green board would be easier on our eyes. To Raskol, that seemed unlikely. “They’re trying to confuse us,” he said, and he sighed and shook his head slowly, as if his suspicions about the true purpose of school had finally been confirmed by these green blackboards. (Years would pass before chalkboard [E.A.] became the general term, and during the intervening period of uncertainty the nation’s youth, innocent victims of a summertime revolution in the technology of wall-mounted writing surfaces, sat puzzled through millions of student hours pretending to listen to geography and geometry but unable to stop asking themselves, “What the heck should I call that thing on the wall?” [from Where Do You Stop, by Eric Kraft]