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Floating in a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Bubble

Every college student remembers the feeling: Wrapped in a campus cocoon, you become oblivious to the outside world. An earthquake in Chile? Market crash on Wall Street? Sorry, haven’t heard; paper due tomorrow.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students call it “the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ bubble,” a phrase coined a dozen years ago by Laura Young Connelly ’88, who now lives in Cape Elizabeth.

During her first year at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, she took Professor Garold Thumm’s political science course. Part of the grade depended on keeping up with current events, but Connelly was negligent. When Thumm asked her to answer a current- events question, she replied, “I’m sorry, I don’t know. I feel like I’ve been in a bubble at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.”

The simile stuck with her. A year later, as WRBC news director, she devised a scheme to get people to listen to the radio news show. “We printed up flyers one day and put them out in Commons. They read, ‘What is the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ bubble?’ The next day I put it out again. People began to talk about it.”

A third poster posed the question again but added a kicker: “What is the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ bubble? Listen to WRBC.” A promotional spot on WRBC not only revealed the answer but gave Connolly’s advice on how to break the bubble: Listen to the news on WRBC.

The rest, as they say, is linguistic history.

— H. Jay Burns