English vocabulary in the news: Silver surfer

Any comic book geeks out there will know the Silver Surfer as a character featured in the Fantastic Four comics. I saw it used in the news in another, interesting way this weekend in this article.

The way it is used here is to talk about elderly people using the Internet. ‘Silver’ refers to the colour of a typical elderly person’s hair and ‘surfer’ because they surf the Internet.

One of the students I used to teach online was 83 years old. She’s a great example of a silver surfer using the Internet for lifelong learning.