Loren Greiff had just closed a big executive placement, the kind of deal a recruiter celebrates. In her email to the hiring manager she let one cheerful word slip: “yippee.” A few minutes later, there was a knock on her office door. It was her boss. Greiff, in her telling on the Bossed Up podcast, assumed she was about to be congratulated. “I’m like, wow, I’m the bee’s knees,” she recalled. Instead, her boss told her she was being placed on a performance improvement plan. The reason: that kind of language was unprofessional, and “we don’t do that around here.” Greiff was 54, working at a prestigious executive recruiting firm, and genuinely baffled. She wondered, briefly, whether she’d somehow dropped an F-bomb without noticing. She hadn’t. The offense was “yippee.” That was Friday. By 10 a.m. Monday she had done something she says she’d never done in her life, being a long-game person by nature. She quit. An upset woman looks at her work email. Photo credit: Adam Satria via Unsplash. Warning signs of a deeper issue For a while she assumed the PIP was about the email, or maybe about the fact that she’d pushed back on her boss over it. As she sat with it, though, a different shape emerged from the previous several months. Her one-on-ones had been quietly canceled. She’d been redirected out of meetings she used to lead. Work she’d done had been credited to colleagues. The “yippee” wasn’t the cause of anything. It was the pretext at the end of a slow, months-long process of being edged toward the door, and, in Greiff’s reading, the thing actually driving it was her age. “I helped them believe it,” she said in her TEDx talk, delivered at TEDxSugar Creek Women under the title “Ageism Loves Silence.” That’s the uncomfortable core of her argument: that she’d spent months absorbing the small exclusions without naming them, not wanting to make waves, and that the silence is part of how the cycle runs. The talk has resonated well beyond her own network, racking up tens of thousands of views and a comment section full of people describing the same quiet push. A dynamic pivot Rather than fold the experience into a private grievance, Greiff built a second career on it. She founded an executive career consultancy, PortfolioRocket, aimed at helping professionals over 40 navigate a job market that tends to treat them as past their peak rather than in the middle of their run. Her central reframe is that experienced workers are coached, subtly, into shrinking, leaning on applications and waiting to be discovered, and that the fix is to flip from passive to active. Clients should instead be leading with the specific, expensive problems they’re uniquely equipped to solve rather than apologizing for the years it took to learn how. She also has a particular hatred for one piece of HR vocabulary, which produced the best line of her talk. “Can we all agree to stop using the word ‘seasoned’?” she said from the stage. “That’s a word for meat. Not people.” View this post on Instagram Ageism in the workplace The frustration isn’t hers alone, and the data backs up the scale of it. AARP has found that the substantial majority of workers over 50 say they’ve seen or experienced age discrimination on the job, a number that’s stayed stubbornly high year after year. What makes Greiff’s version land is the specificity of the mechanism. Not a slammed door, but a canceled one-on-one, a reassigned meeting, a misattributed win, and, finally, a written warning over a six-letter expression of joy. The word was never the point. It was just the part they were willing to say out loud. The post She wrote ‘yippee’ in an email and got put on a PIP. Then the pattern clicked. appeared first on Upworthy.

Think back to your high school senior yearbook where people scribbled “keep in touch” or “stay sweet!” in its back pages. Usually, these were just polite suggestions, and most people wouldn’t expect you to live out either platitude. But what if, 60 years after you graduated, those same people were around to follow up? DID you stay sweet? WAS your summer “kick ass?” That is what’s happening at Westminster Senior Living facility, wherein over 50 classmates from Austin High School have all gathered to live in the same space. Some reside in independent living, while others have more assisted care. But their bond, all the way back to those teen years, is as strong as ever. But now, they’ve traded in their cigarettes and history books for early dinners and bingo. And they seem to be having a great time doing so! View this post on Instagram A tenth of the population In an Instagram post linked to ABC News, they share a photo of a handful of senior citizens posing in front of red and white balloons. Some are in wheelchairs while others are standing. However they’re situated, their common thread seems to be pure contentment. ABC News and GMA writer Shafiq Najib shares that a resident named Cynthia Leach, who graduated from Austin High in 1977, came up with an idea to do annual reunions at Westminster. It simply made sense to Leach from a practical standpoint. “We have over 50 people on our list for our reunion here of folks that graduated from Austin High. That’s about a tenth of the population of the independent living folks here.” The mighty Red Jackets Ruth Sunil, Senior Director of Community Life Services at Westminster, shares with Upworthy that it’s extra special because the school spirit has continued throughout these residents’ lives. “This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Red Jackets, Austin High School’s iconic spirit organization. At Westminster Senior Living in Austin, we have identified 10 residents who were Red Jackets. One of our residents, Mike Roche, was a former Austin High cheerleader who recently rediscovered the uniform he wore 73 years ago and still has it today. Another resident, Eleanor Chote, has a particularly unique connection to the organization. Her mother-in-law helped establish the Red Jackets, and her sister, Kay Ballard, who also lives at Westminster, served as a Red Jacket as well. Together, these residents represent nearly a century of memories, friendships, and traditions tied to an organization that continues to hold deep meaning in their lives.” Austin High pep song. Photo courtesy of Westminster Senior Living Susan Driver, class of 1962, was a Red Jacket and loves spotting so many around the senior living home. “It was wonderful because even if we weren’t Red Jackets in the same class, it was a shared experience that we had in common and could bond over.” When Driver was asked if she could have ever imagined “living among classmates” 60ish years later, she said it had never crossed her mind. “But, of course, when you are young, you don’t think you’ll ever be old!” Carole Sikes, another Austin High senior turned Westminster senior, graduated back in 1956, and said she really enjoys seeing the Red Jackets around as well. “Well, it’s a very pleasant thing. When my husband and I moved here, we were just delighted to see how many former Austin High students were here, Red Jackets or others.” School spirit forever It’s not surprising that many of the seniors have remained spirited. I have a few friends who attended Austin High. One is KVET’s “JB and Sandy” radio co-host Tricia Mcllree, who graduated in ’89. She’s not at all shocked to see that these friendships have stood the test of time or that the “pep” of the school remains intact so many years later. “The entire school showed up to the football games and pep rallies and cheered each other on.” Austin High School. Mike Roche, Carlene Jenkins. Photo courtesy of Westminster Senior Living And as for her own group of tight-knit friends, Mcllree adds, “We all plan to grow old together and live in our very own Golden Girls-style compound, not unlike the AHS alumni living together in Westminster Senior Living. They clearly have it figured out!” The comments under the Instagram post are super supportive. One jokes, “I just know the tea in that community is piping.” This Instagrammer, like so many, has given thought to how they could perhaps pull off a situation not unlike The Golden Girls. “We’ve talked about a house with a common area and separate bedrooms. Hadn’t thought about ‘taking over’ a facility, but sounds smart.” Another had an excellent suggestion for television producers who might be paying attention: “This should be a reality show!” Austin High School alums. Photo courtesy from Westminster Senior Living The post From senior class to senior home: over 50 classmates from Austin High School now live together appeared first on Upworthy.

If you’ve ever seen an unfinished website or print layout, you’ve likely seen chunks of text that begin “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…” This dummy text is simply a placeholder, so it’s not meant to mean anything. But why do we use that text specifically? Few people know the true answer to that question, which led Emily Zhang, creator of the YouTube channel Rabbit Hole, to deep dive into the history of “Lorem ipsum.” As it turns out, what we thought we knew about it was largely wrong. Not only that, but Zhang’s investigation revealed a delightfully human story of oopsies, ah-has, and eh-close-enoughs that resulted in the mysterious Latin-ish placeholder text. “What Lorem ipsum actually is,” Zhang said, “is a far stranger series of decisions that lived beyond anyone’s expectations to become the most famous nonsense text in the world, and an unsolved mystery.” The mysteries of Lorem ipsum First, let’s go over some common misperceptions and what we thought we knew that turned out to be wrong. Many people assume “Lorem ipsum” text is Latin, and a lot of it is. But “lorem” itself is not a Latin word. And in many iterations of the text, letters that don’t even exist in Latin show up. Those anomalies have led people to believe it’s simply a Latin form of gibberish, but that’s not really true, either. Another belief is that it originated with a typesetter in the 1500s. But that turned out to be an accidental misunderstanding based on a throwaway comment by an academic who never thought people would run with it. Essentially, there’s been a lot of lore surrounding Lorem ipsum, but there’s never been a definitive history of it written. No academic papers on it exist. And no experts have fully explored questions like: Why is it kind of Latin but kind of not? Where did it originally come from and when? Who decided to use it in the first place? 'Lorem ipsum' refers to placeholder text to demonstrate the visual style of a document, webpage, or typeface. It doesn't mean anything.The point of 'lorem ipsum' is that it looks realistic enough to work as a demonstration, yet signifies nothing. Weirdly relatable, huh?— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) February 12, 2026 A former Latin professor sheds new light on the old text Zhang spoke to Richard McClintock, former Latin professor and publications director at Hampden-Sydney College. McClintock had responded to an assertion in Before & After Magazine that Lorem ipsum was intentionally meaningless. He had done his own deep dive into where it originated, and had found it in Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum, which translates as “On the Ends of Good and Evil.” The lesser-known work was written around 45 BCE. But the direct Lorem ipsum text differs from Cicero’s. There’s a word ending in “ng” in the modern text, a letter combination that doesn’t exist in Latin. The “v” had been removed from the word “velit” to become just “elit.” And where did the not-really-a-word “Lorem” come from? McClintock solved the “Lorem” mystery with a printed version of the Cicero text published in a 1914 book. The sentence starts at the end of one page: “Neque porro quisquam est qui do-” and continues on the next page turn: “lorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet,consectetur, adipisci velit.” So “Lorem” is actually part of the word “dolorem.” It appears someone took the words from page 36 of a 1914 version of a 2000-year-old text to use as a placeholder. But who and why, and how did it get altered over time? Lorem ipsum text (Photo credit: Canva) How Lorem ipsum typos ended up in 1987 software Zhang had the origin, but there was a big gap between the 1914 book and the use of Lorem ipsum in the Aldus Pagemaker page formatting software in 1987 (the oldest documented use of it she had found). So, she set off to find the people responsible for that. She tracked down Laura Perry, the person who added Lorem ipsum to the Aldus Pagemaker program as a tool option. She’d remembered the Lorem ipsum text from when she had used Letraset, a dry transfer method of lettering created in the 1960s. Basically, they were letter decals you could rub onto paper rather than having to stencil letters by hand. Perry told Zhang that Letraset had a page of Lorem ipsum text to differentiate body text from other lettering types. Lorem ipsum allowed designers to easily play with layouts. But to get Lorem ipsum into Pagemaker, Perry had to type the text by hand. She typed quickly and made a bunch of typos. But since she wasn’t sure whether the text was copyrighted, she allowed the typos to stay, hoping the mistakes would protect her. “If you see a nibh, zzril, or consectetuer with an extra E, that’s Laura’s Lorem ipsum,” Zhang shares. Love it when my glad wrap has Lorem Ipsum on it because the packaging designers forgot to put copy there pic.twitter.com/xyZIhVeY3d— Oskar Howell (@oskarhowell) July 28, 2023 The librarian who created Lorem ipsum for Letraset in the 1960s Zhang tracked down a 1966 Letraset Lorem ipsum page on eBay. Comparing it to the 1914 Cicero text, she found it did take text from the top of page 36. But then it skipped about 20 pages to take more text, then did the same thing a couple more times. And some other languages got tucked into the Lorem ipsum text as well. A few Spanish words appear here, a few French words there. Letters like J,K, Y, and Z that aren’t part of the Latin alphabet were added. And some words were removed from the original Cicero text as well. Zhang received an email from Dave Farey, one of the earliest designers at Letraset, who shared this story with her: “At a marketing meeting sometime during 1966, publicity design manager Colin Orchard mentioned that a sheet of dummy text would be useful for his work, and also for graphic designers generally. They needed more expertise, but fortunately, Letraset had developed a strong relationship with the Saint Bride Printing Library, and the head librarian, James Mosley. James was an academic who devoted his professional life to the history and contemporary use of printing and typography. James realized that all type founders in Europe and the USA use their own placeholder text in their own language, and he looked to an alternative.” Unfortunately, Mosley died in 2025, so no one can ask him why he chose Lorem ipsum specifically. We may never know why he altered the text the way he did. But here we are. Lorem ipsum is commonly used as placeholder text. (Photo credit: Canva) Zhang’s research made Lorem ipsum sources change their story Several websites dedicated to the famous dummy text have claimed that Lorem ipsum was created by a typsetter in the 1500s. But that was based on a throwaway comment McClintock put into his Before & After correction, not an actual fact. After Zhang’s deep dive revealed more information than previous digging had uncovered, those sites corrected their histories. There are still mysteries in the Lorem ipsum lore, but we now know a lot more about it than we did. Zhang’s investigation not only gave us new insights into the history of Lorem ipsum, but it also showed what a focused individual with a desire to find answers can do. For more fascinating deep dives, you can follow Rabbit Hole on YouTube. The post Woman’s deep dive into ‘Lorem ipsum’ dummy text reveals we’ve had its history oh so wrong appeared first on Upworthy.

Here’s a strange sentence: Gen Z is throwing more dinner parties than any generation in history.  What? Yes, Gen Z. The generation we all picture glued to their screens, who we assumed had given up on getting together. Turns out, they are the most enthusiastic group of hosts we’ve ever seen. They’re swapping pricey nights out for fun themed dinners, potluck spreads, and cozy nights in with their friends. The dinner party, once a symbol of stuffy adulthood, is officially back on the menu. For a generation that’s battling loneliness on a historic scale, yes, it really is that serious. Dinner parties have become a lifeline.  @ourtablescompany She never called hosting. She just said she was having people over! #hosting #dinnerparty #host #cooking #fyp ♬ I’ve Seen It – Olivia Dean There’s one catch. Throwing a dinner party and actually knowing how to host one are two very different skills. A confusing, almost contradictory trend has emerged, too. Although Gen Z craves connection, the act of hosting? It stresses them out. One study found that 87% of Gen Z hosts dread guests arriving, so much so, that 77% have cancelled plans because they felt overwhelmed. In a national survey, 49% of Gen Zers admitted that they were too uncertain of their cooking to host guests. Mid-charcuterie-board, Gen Z is beginning to realize that nobody ever taught them how to do this.  Enter a mom from the Midwest and her Gen Z daughter.  The video that struck a nerve On TikTok, a mother-daughter duo behind the account @ourtablescompany has been racking up millions of views with a deceptively simple series: “Chic things my mom does as a host that change the whole night.” The pinned video— with 1.7 million views—opens with a line that says:  “She never called it hosting. She just said she was having people over.” Boom. That’s it, the magic summed up in a single line. Hospitality doesn’t have to come with a performance review. It is merely what you do when people come over.  The account is run by Georgia and her mom Annette, a Midwest duo from a home “where the kitchen is always running and the table is always set for one more.”  @ourtablescompany A first look at our Golden Hour in Greece Dinner Party #dinnerparty #ourtable #momanddaughter #fyp #hosting ♬ Countryside – Andrew Joy The origin story is sweet: at the start of 2025, Georgia asked Annette to host monthly dinner parties so she could study the art of hospitality she’d grown up seeing. What began as a few videos for their dinner guests became a community of nearly a million across TikTok, Instagram, and their Substack, Saved You a Seat.  When did the rules change?  To understand why young viewers are flocking to @ourtablescompany’s videos, it’s important to know what the dinner party has become. In a recent Telegraph piece, writer Lorna Perry contrasts her own gatherings with the ones her mother enjoyed at the same age. Her mom planned elaborate three-course meals from cookbooks and made everything from scratch. Perry’s generation reaches for social-media recipes, a big pot of pasta, and store-bought snacks. Paper invitations became Partiful notifications. Thank-you notes became follow-up texts. Cancellations got easier…and more common. “The golden rules for entertaining have been torn up and rewritten. No one even calls it a dinner party any more,” Perry writes.  The old dinner party rules are gone. Photo credit: Canva She’s not knocking Gen Z, but capturing a snapshot of a generation that’s entertaining under different rules: it’s more casual, more candid, and more affordable. That’s what happens when you live in a time plagued by financial uncertainty and where more people than ever are in the workforce. But it also means the old script for how to make a night feel special got lost somewhere. And an entire generation is feeling its absence. The tips aren’t revolutionary. That’s the point. None of Annette’s advice will shock a seasoned host. She puts a drink in your hand within the first five minutes. She dims the lights before the first guest arrives. She sets the table the day before, and pulls something out of the oven right as you walk in, so the house smells like a wonderful dinner. @ourtablescompany you loved part 1 so here’s part 2! the small but meaningful things that change the night. #hosting #dinnerparty #fyp #host #cooking ♬ original sound – Ms.Kly – Klyracapinig✿

People love McDonald’s for its diverse menu. Some crave the salty fries, and others hit the Golden Arches for a burger or nuggets. Of course, there’s also a huge fan base for Coca-Cola fountain drinks. McDonald’s has a special system that may claim to make its drinks the crispiest, bubbliest, and tastiest among fast-food drinks. Ronald and his pals have dipped their toes into new waters with their McCafe drinks, and guests love them. Rumor has it that this fall, McDonald’s and Red Bull will collaborate for some incredible new drink offerings. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Snackolator (@snackolator) McDonald’s and Red Bull are a Dream Come True Instagrammer Snackolater shared news of McDonald’s upcoming collaboration with Red Bull and what drinks we can expect this fall. “Recently, McDonald’s announced that Red Bull drinks will be in the next wave of new McCafe drinks this fall and are currently testing SIX new flavors, along with four creations that were unveiled at their worldwide conference a few weeks ago,” Snackolator shared. The company is currently testing six different flavor combinations that sound amazing. “The Cherry Rush, Green Apple, Popping Paradise, and Tropical Cloud drinks have just begun testing, while the Dragonberry and Peach Boost energizers have been tested for months,” Snackolator added. “Then the new Blue Ocean, Popping Citrus, Strawberry Shortcake, and Triple Berry were sampled at the recent conference.” This person can’t wait, but would love to see more options. “Im so excited for this! Also is anyone else hoping that they do sugar free versions too?” Others may just make a McDonald’s run for this collab. “Im gonna get a heart attack,” a comment reads. “Not a fan of McDonalds but maybe for Red Bull,” another person added. Which sounds best to you? This story’s featured image is by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images