I always loved teaching kids about writing. Helping them figure out how to say just what they meant and watching them discover they could entertain, inform, provoke, and create with their words was wonderful fun.
How ill prepared I was for the wasteland of techspeak. Something bad happens to intelligent, caring, thoughtful people when they start spending time with technology. They start murdering the English language (I’m sure the same thing is happening in other languages, too, but English is the only one I speak). When I encounter egregious abuses, I jot them down, partly because I want proof I didn’t imagine them, partly because someone has to document the decline of civilization as we know it, and partly because some of them are just plain hilarious. I can’t resist the urge to share some of them with you.
Mind you, these are real things actual people said, and they were being serious when they said them. I swear. I couldn’t make some of these up if I tried. Try these on for size:
o During a discussion of how to change the way computer users verify their identity on campus, there was consensus that a type of proxy server called Squid needed to be retired. The proposed process was termed “desquidification.”
o Another agenda item that day included the word “defuzzify.” I learned that when computers try to guess what you meant to type when you type something incorrectly, it’s sometimes called “fuzzy matching.” It takes a lot of computing horsepower to do this, so sometimes people want to stop doing it to make things run faster. Hence, “defuzzify.”
o Instead of rebuilding or restructuring a system, it is “re-architected.”
o If one can actually accomplish a given technology task, it is “implementable,” which I think is lamentable.
o In technology, any word can be a verb. We don’t summarize anything briefly, we “thumbnail” it (the idea for this blog post came to me after recoiling in horror when I realized I had actually said this – I’ve been trying to make amends ever since). When we want to put something new in place, we “obsolete” the old thing. I’m not kidding.
Had enough? I have lots more, but I promised no rants in this blog. Just one more for today, and it’s my favorite.
When you are not in cyberspace or virtual space, but instead working, playing, meeting, and living with real human beings who are physically present, do you know where you are? You’re in meatspace. How flattering. It makes me feel so special.
No doubt you tech heads out there have many such pearls to share. I’d love to hear them. But for now, I’m signing off and heading back to meatspace.
Posted on August 21st, 2007 by Curt Lieneck
Filed under: Uncategorized
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.