Melting Snow

Fidget Spinners and Other Fad Gadgets

Sunday, June 18, 2017

"All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use."
Jared Diamond

The "Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise"  prompt for DAY 1192
Fidget Spinners: Another toy fad, or are there actual benefits to them? Do you have one? Can you see why they're popular?

According to Dictionary.com two of the definitions for fidget are (1) "to move about restlessly, nervously, or impatiently", and (2) "to cause to fidget; make uneasy."1 The same dictionary gives one of the definitions for spinner as "a person or thing that spins."2 So, I guess, the definition for fidget spinner would be an object that spins nervously, restlessly, or impatiently with the potential of making other people or animals uneasy.

Given this definition, I think people who own cats should be careful about purchasing and using this item. I know, from my experience with cats, that unusual or weird items make them nervous. If a person uses this item in front of a cat then the cat is going to go into attack mode, and this can be dangerous because the cat could attack the hand using the fidget spinner. I am not sure how a dog would react because that would depend on the dog's temperament, personality, and how close the dog is to the person using the fidget spinner. If the dog thinks that the fidget spinner is attacking his/her person then the dog will go into protect mode, and attempt to rescue the person from the fidget spinner.

Fad Gadgets

Fidget spinner, just another fad gadget,
A time waster or a time killer
Depending upon whether you are procrastinating or waiting.

Growing up, we had several fad gadgets
All of them waiting, somewhere in the house, for us to
Decided which one we were going to play with.
Gadgets given to us as birthday-holiday gifts
Each on waiting for me or my siblings to remember
That we enjoyed playing with them for a while, before
Some other toy grabbed our attention.

Footnotes
1  http://www.dictionary.com/browse/fidget
2  http://www.dictionary.com/browse/spinner