Glanceability
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The reason I was in York last night was to attend the 40th birthday celebrations for University Radio York, the UK's oldest student radio station, which began against great odds, only semi-legally, at a time when the government flatly refused to license any broadcasting that would break the BBC's monopoly, and physicists wouldn't assent to the idea that the induction loop technology the students were proposing would restrict the signal to the campus. I had a small role in the founding of the station four decades ago when I was a freshman undergraduate in the Department of Language at the University of York. At last night's reunion dinner I sat with a bunch of guys who started at URY and spent their whole lives in the broadcasting industry. People like and Robin Valk, who worked as a rock DJ in Buffalo, NY, for a few years before returning to Britain to work on software for computer management of radio programming, and Phil Harding, who has spent his career in a succession of different posts at the BBC. Phil taught me a new word that he learned at a seminar on new developments in the cellphone industry: glanceability.
It's quite new: only a few hundred hits on the web so far. In one sense it is used for a property of providing images (e.g., accompanying TV news) that are informative without needing to be looked at continuously; an occasional glance will do. In a slightly different gloss, Lorcan Dempsey says the word is used to talk about "how quickly and easily the visual design conveys information after the user is paying attention to the display."
Now I'm back on the train to Edinburgh the morning after the dinner, speeding along in a first class compartment sipping coffee from a fine Stoke on Trent china cup at a comfortable table, writing on a Mac laptop, in beautiful weather. Life is good. For those penny-pinching few who are worrying about how much of Language Log's expenses budget I am spending, my ticket cost £19.30, which is about $38. But everything standardly costs twice as much in Britain as it does in the USA, so you should think of that as about $20. I think a field trip to interface with the broadcasting industry and learn a brand new word is amply worthwhile, and I do not expect to have any trouble with the Language Log corporate types when I turn in my receipts for the trip. This is not some kind of boondoggle. This is linguistic research, and vocabulary development.
There is free wireless Internet service both at York railway station and on the train. No cows on the line today. As I work, I enjoy taking occasional looks at the little Yorkshire farmyards that we pass. They have a certain very appealing . . . glanceability.