Chasing the Jargon Jitters

Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is Professor and Director of the Center for Cognitive

Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and author of The

Language Instinct (HarperCollins, 1995).

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RAM, ROM, MIPS, FLOPS, CPUs, IRQs, asynchronous floating-point multitasking

initialization delimiters -- why do computers breed so much godawful jargon? Is

it all a bunch of incantations muttered by the wireheads to initimidate new

users (or, as they call us, lusers)? Will digital argot corrupt the English

language, leading future generations to mumble in the acronym-clotted

gobbledygook of computer manuals?

Negative. Computer jargon is inevitable, even welcome. As far as jargon goes,

it's not so bad, and English will be the better for it.

Jargon, like cholesterol, comes in good and bad kinds. One of the bad kinds is

government doublespeak: pacification (bombing), inoperative statement (lie),

revenue enhancement (taxes), energetic disassembly (what happened at

Chernobyl). Another is social-science bafflegab: high-falutin' lingo like

strategized interpersonal programmatics and ameliorative contextual

interactions that hides the fact that the academician is talking about

banalities or nothing at all. Then there are the rapidly changing shibboleths

and code-words that separate the elite from the rabble, the cool from the

dweebs.

But sometimes sincere, plain-speaking folks simply need names for things.

Knitting, golf, cooking, fly-fishing, bridge -- every specialized activity

evolves its own jargon. Just as Adam had to give names to every beast of the

field and every fowl of the air, the first person who wants to identify a new

gizmo to a listener has to figure out what kind of noise to make to get the

idea across.

Language provides two options. One is to cobble together a phrase describing

the gizmo. When biblical Hebrew was revived in Israel and had to be embellished

to meet the demands of twentieth-century life, the first translation of

"microscope" was the device that makes the hyssop on the wall look like the

cedars of Lebanon. It's clear, poetic even, but if you imagine a conversation

among harried lab technicians you immediately see the problem. The option at

the other extreme is to coin a nice simple word, like flurg. That's short and

sweet, but unless you are a member of a clique who is in contact with the

dubber and have memorized the coinage, it's gibberish. Clarity and conciseness

trade off; you can be either clear and verbose or concise and opaque.

Most jargon starts off near the clear-but-long-winded end of the tradeoff. New

words are manufactured by gluing old ones together, adding prefixes and

suffixes, thinking up metaphors, and borrowing words from other languages. But

as people become familiar with a term, they try to save their breath and to

keep the attention of their listeners by abbreviating it. Frequently used

words inexorably slide towards the short-and-opaque end of the continuum. Just

think of the jargon of everyday life. If Benjamin Franklin were transported to

the first half of this century, he could make educated guesses about the

meanings of refrigerator, television, and even fac-simile telegraphy

("make-similar" "distant-writing"). But were he to arrive in the second half,

fridge, TV and fax would leave him baffled.

Computer jargon has its share of the unwieldy-turned-unclear. Disk Operating

System becomes DOS, modulator-demodulator becomes modem, multiplexer becomes

mux. And like the rest of language, it preserves fossils of extinct beings and

dead metaphors. No one thinks twice about plastic silverware or dialing a

pushbutton phone, and few pause to notice that the clich@act[h] bringing things

to a head is a disgusting allusion to the life-cycle of a pimple. Likewise few

people realize that booting up their microcomputer is not, metaphorically

speaking, giving it a swift kick, but letting it lift itself up by its

bootstraps. The verb is a souvenir of the bootstrap loader tapes in the dawn of

computing whose first few bytes were instructions for reading in the rest of

the tape.

But computer lingo also has many metaphors that are not only alive but

downright cuddly -- mouse, floppy, handshake, bug, shareware, number-crunching,

snarfing, and readme files, for example. Who let them in? To answer the

question, you have to know two more jargon words, which identify the main

cultures of computing: the hackers and the suits.

Contrary to media usage, "hackers" are not pranksters who break into mainframe computers and accidentally start World War III, or worse, the loathsome creeps

who devise and spread viruses in real life. Those are crackers. A hacker is a

member of an unofficial meritocracy distinguished by their ability to program

quickly and enthusiastically. They do not fit the stereotype of the

pasty-faced, polyester-clad, pocket-protected need-a-lifes. Rather, they are

literate, articulate quasi-hippies, and their culture esteems precise, witty

wordplay.

Eric Raymond's New Hacker's Dictionary (MIT Press) provides a glimpse of the

vast lexicon that supplies the friendlier examples of our computer jargon. By

analogy to a typo, absent-minded hackers can make a thinko or a braino, and

clumsy ones can make a mouso, especially if they suffer from mouse elbow,

unless of course they are ambimoustrous. Exiting a window on the screen is

defenestrating; leaving off the page numbers at the foot of a printed document

is depeditating it ("cutting off its feet," by analogy with decapitating). A

poorly-designed program might be barfulous (nauseating) or bozotic (reminiscent

of the eponymous clown), or display a high degree of bogosity. Such bogotified

programs can be detected by the bogons they emit, which follow the laws of

bogodynamics and can be detected with that hypothetical but indispensable

instrument, the bogometer. Bogometers are also useful in the presence of

astrologers, politicians, professors with a Theory of Everything, and, most of

all, the dreaded marketroids or suits.

The Hacker's Dictionary defines suit as follows: "n. 1. Ugly and uncomfortable

'business clothing' often worn by non-hackers. Invariably worn with a 'tie', a

strangulation device that partially cuts off the blood supply to the brain. It

is thought that this explains much about the behavior of suit-wearers. 2. A

person who habitually wears suits. See loser, burble, management, and

brain-damaged." Hackers are exasperated by the suits' breathless promises to

customers of features that are extremely difficult to program or that violate

the laws of physics. They are even more contemptuous of their buzzword-laden

adspeak (synergy, interface), their inelegant neologisms (prioritize,

securitize), and their technical malaprops (such as parameter referring to

"limits" rather than to "dimension of variation."). At least to hear the

hackers talk, the more awful computer jargon can be attributed to the

management.

But putting aside who is to blame for all that lingo, what's a poor luser to

do? The answer is certainly not to sit down and memorize a glossary as if it

was high school Latin homework. Instead, think of the circumstances in which

you actually welcome jargon. You are at the parts counter at Sears desperately

pantomiming and circumlocuting, begging for the long rubber thingummybob that

keeps the soapy water from getting all over the floor. If only you had

remembered that it is called a gasket! You are sharing a culinary creation with

a friend, and would save a bundle on long-distance charges if you both knew

what it meant to bake, barbecue, blanch, boil, braise, brew, broil, brown,

coddle, decoct, deep-fry, devil, escallop, fricassee, fry, grill, pan-fry,

parboil, parch, percolate, poach, pressure-cook, reduce, roast, saut@act[e,

scald, scorch, sear, seethe, simmer, sizzle, steam, steep], and stew.

Necessity is the mother of vocabulary. Most people learn what RAM means when

they first discover they need more of it. The trick to mastering computer

jargon is first to master the computer. As the widgets and rituals become

second nature, they turn into mental pegs upon which to hang the words. Of

course the hackers and manual writers have a responsibility, too: to pick apt

metaphors that keep the lingo both transparent and concise, and to allow lusers

to get work done needing as little of it as possible.

And what about the English language? Like it or not, dozens of

computer-inspired words have been co-opted into everyday conversation and

writing: bells and whistles, bootstrap, debug, down (not working), flame,

(fulminate self-righteously), hack, hard copy, hard-wired, interactive, K

(thousands), kluge (a clumsy but serviceable solution), mega-, on-line, real

time, snail-mail, software, time-sharing, and virtual (simulated). Language-

lovers, relax; this is what the hackers would call A Good Thing.

For centuries English has been snarfing up the jargon of various cliques,

cults, guilds, and subcultures. The dictionary has thousands of examples:

countdown and blast-off from the space program, souped-up and shift gears from

the automobile, trip and freak out from drug-users, boogie and jam from jazz,

front-runner and shoo-in from horse-racing, and so on. Go back even farther and

you find that thousands of currently unexceptionable words were at one time

denounced as corruptions -- sham, banter, mob, stingy, and fun, for example. In

fact, when you think about it, where else could words come from but slang? Not

from some committee! The breathtaking half-a-million-word vocabulary of English

is built from the grass-roots contributions of countless slang-slingers and

jargon-mongers.

If you ever find yourself longing for a language with a more orderly admissions

procedure, I give you French. They have had the Academie Francaise

and the General Commissariat of the French Language and the High Committee for

the Defense and Expansion of the French Language and the Francophone High

Council and the Computer Technology Committee, all charged with keeping the

language "pure" (sometimes with the authority to levy fines and jail

sentences). Originally concerned with finding replacements for le cheeseburger

and le weekend, the committees have become increasingly anxious about imported

computer jargon. Computer, software, data-processing, kit, video clip, and

buffer have been deemed linguistically incorrect; les hackers must use

ordinateur, logiciel, informatique, prêt a monter, bande video

promotionelle, and memoire tampon].

Where has it gotten them? Their own technology commission estimated that using the French words take 20% more space. And check out an English-French/French-

English dictionary some time -- the English-French half is much thicker than

the French-English half. Centuries of guarding the purity of the French

language have left it with verbose expressions and a puny vocabulary. But then

what can you expect from a bunch of suits?