Stream to the yak-fest meld
« previous post | next post »
Ellis Weiner has a very funny "Shouts and Murmurs" feature in The New Yorker this week (October 19): it's an imagined memo from a marketing assistant at an understaffed publishing company, laying out a marketing plan for a new book. Those who have published books and filled out author's marketing questionnaires will smirk at slight exaggerations of things they actually recall reading ("We can send you a list of bookstores in your area once you fill out the My Local Bookstores list on your Author's Questionnaire"); but there is worse to come.
This marketing department is into viral marketing. The author has had a Facebook account set up for him, and is advised to start a personal blog and feed its content to everyone he knows:
We use CopyBuoy via Hoster Broaster, because it streams really easily into a Plaxo/LinkedIn yak-fest meld. When you register, click "Endless," and under "Contacts" just list everyone you've ever met… [M]ake sure you spray-feed your URL in niblets open-face to the skein. We like Reddit bites (they're better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold. Then just Digg your uploads in a viral spiral to your social networks via an FB/MS interlink torrent.
Pure gibberish, but cleverly suggestive of the sort of real geekspeak that makes you feel you have stumbled in on a newly evolved language, related to your own but not nearly closely enough. Or stayed away from the computer support staff for too many months and then stopped by to find that the "software solutions" they are now supporting are so alien that you don't even know what problems they are supposed to be the solutions to…
Lazar said,
October 17, 2009 @ 3:08 pm
Even though I'm a reasonably Net-savvy 20 year old, it still strikes me as odd, when I think about it, that "viral" is now a good thing.
John Cowan said,
October 17, 2009 @ 6:41 pm
Primo Levi has a nice comment on this in one of his essays: the trouble with computer jargon is that it repurposes words already known ("open" and "file" are his examples) rather than devising its own jargon, as most professions have done. This drags in unwanted associations which just end up confusing newbies. Computer users think of a "file" as a basically monolithic object, but it was originally named after a container, the physical file folder with multiple documents ("records") in it; file folders can, of course, be opened (unfolded) to see what is inside them. Now "folder" for most computer users has taken on the meaning "file of files", pushing the original metaphor up by one level, as it were.
Benjamin Zimmer said,
October 17, 2009 @ 6:46 pm
For some more techno-jargon from repurposed words, see my Word Routes column "Pushing to the Cloud."
Mark Liberman said,
October 17, 2009 @ 8:30 pm
John Cowan: the trouble with computer jargon is that it repurposes words already known ("open" and "file" are his examples) rather than devising its own jargon, as most professions have done.
You mean like the flavors of quarks (up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom), or strings, or the landscape? Or, for that matter, speed, distance, and time?
Re-purposing of ordinary language as jargon within linguistics includes island, trace, spell-out, crash, etc.
anon said,
October 17, 2009 @ 10:10 pm
The part that makes the gibberish most successful is that about half of the buzzwords used are *actual* buzzwords.
Kapitano said,
October 18, 2009 @ 4:39 am
Surely most of the evolution of language consists in "repurposing" new words, as opposed to inventing new ones?
In music technology, we have: Saw, Square, Ramp, Filter, Patch, Mix, Compress, Expand, Split, Invert, Bus, Equalisation, Dub, Delay, Feed, Loop, Sixteenth, Flange and a load of others.
All these have meanings derived from their common meanings, though some, like Flange, have traveled quite a long way. Off hand, I can't think of any words in music-tech that don't have related meanings in non-specialist language, or other fields.
peter said,
October 18, 2009 @ 4:59 am
"Surely most of the evolution of language consists in "repurposing" new words, as opposed to inventing new ones?
In music technology, we have: Saw, Square, Ramp, Filter, Patch, Mix, Compress, Expand, Split, Invert, Bus, Equalisation, Dub, Delay, Feed, Loop, Sixteenth, Flange and a load of others."
Not to forget those words repurposed for earlier music technologies: adagio, allegro, allegretto, crescendo, diminuendo, forte, piano, rallentando, etc. Or does repurposing count as inventing when the words are taken from another language?
Tim Silverman said,
October 18, 2009 @ 8:13 am
@peter: If you want English musical jargon derived from English, how about note, staff, quaver and bar?
Peter Taylor said,
October 18, 2009 @ 10:02 am
Computer users think of a "file" as a basically monolithic object, but it was originally named after a container, the physical file folder with multiple documents ("records") in it…back in the day when most files were plain text databases with multiple records. A computer file was just a file on a computer, so what else would you call it?
Peter Taylor said,
October 18, 2009 @ 10:03 am
That'll teach me to look at the preview.
…back in the day when most files were plain text databases with multiple records. A computer file was just a file on a computer, so what else would you call it?
peter said,
October 18, 2009 @ 6:47 pm
On the topic of geekspeak, this job advert provides a nice example, and should keep the back-office staff of LL Plaza occupied at least through mid-week in analyzing the text:
http://www.ckuru.com/jobs
fiddler said,
October 19, 2009 @ 12:39 am
On the topic of geekspeak, this job advert provides a nice example, and should keep the back-office staff of LL Plaza occupied at least through mid-week in analyzing the text: http://www.ckuru.com/jobs
Some things never change… from the 2nd paragraph: "This is a great opportunity to get in on the ground floor of this emerging business, do cool stuff, and get paid."
No repurposing there.
Robert said,
October 19, 2009 @ 7:29 am
I need scissors! 61!!
Dan T. said,
October 19, 2009 @ 11:54 am
Some old-time geeks like myself still prefer the name "subdirectory" over "folder", since the latter is just the wimpy GUI representation of the former.
Robert said,
October 19, 2009 @ 1:52 pm
Directory is still slightly weird, as you don't ever actually open them up and look at the association tables between file names and the blocks of disk space that make them up. They're given the name directory because that's what they are from the operating system programmer's point of view, rather than the user's.
rpsms said,
October 21, 2009 @ 2:55 pm
Directory is a perfectly normal description, since one definition of "directory" is "a book containing an alphabetic list" (actually the first listed in my dictionary).
As far as I know, the computer file systems themselves were based upon a database model, so a "file" of "records" also makes more sense than alluded to in comments above.
John Cowan said,
October 26, 2009 @ 5:11 pm
Dan T.: I'm with you, but I figured I should nod in the direction of the majority.