The computer industry is introducing words to the language at an alarming rate. Acronyms, verbified nouns, nounified verbs, neogerundives, portmanteau words, nested acronyms--new words have to be coined to categorize the new words being coined.
The military and the underworld continue to be rich sources of euphemism and neologism, perhaps coined to keep outsiders out. But this motivation only explains some of the neologizing going on in the computer industry. Much technoneologizing occurs simply because new things need new names. One word used to describe these new words is technobabble, but is there a word for the phenomenon of their proliferation?
The French have a word for it, so the saying says, and if they do it must be official, since the French maintain a governmental agency to certify new words as part of the official language. I have a word for it, too. Biblical authority speaks of a tower of Babel, but I think that the current neologistic overload is best characterized as Babblegate. I recommend the word to speakers of all languages, including those watchers at the gates of the French language.
The term "gate" itself, variously parameterized, is an overloaded operator. Little by little, new uses of the word have crept into the language. Watergate led (linguistically) to Contragate, and on to othergates. If you throw in HeavensGate as a metaphor for a career catastrophe, these gates all lead to a meaning something like "a serious blunder that will cause the blunderer some temporary distress, but for which he will later be pardoned."
No doubt the reason we don't speak of AppleGate is that there have been so many of them. The latest AppleGate in the making is the copy-protection brainstorm. One sees why computer game companies grudgingly wear the albatross of copy protection, but why officials of a hardware company should voluntarily go around making speeches in which they hang this dead bird around the company's neck is beyond me.
And which of Bill, Darryl, and Robert Gates will give us a new twist on the word? My guess is Robert, in 1996. Various explanations have been advanced for the timidity of Democratic Presidential noncandidates, but no one has asked the obvious question: Would you want to run against someone with so many friends in the CIA? If Robert Gates runs for President in 1996, my guess is that he'll run unopposed. Call it coupgate.
These mordant speculations are inspired by reading, in the same day, Christopher Hitchens's article, "Unlawful, Unelected, and Unchecked: How the CIA subverts the government at home" in the October Harper's, and John Barry's Technobabble (MIT Press, 1991). The article being too grim to contemplate, I'll describe the book. Be forewarned that the author is an old friend and that I did a technical review of the book in manuscript.
Technobabble is both scholarly and entertaining. Although it deals with the roots and varieties of technobabble and examines its connections with the lexicons of sex, drugs, religion, and pop psychology, the pace of the book is set by amusing examples, anecdotes, poems, songs, and bloopers (discreet hardware, the geranium transistor). And it pokes a lot of fun at the euphemisms of press release writers, pointing out, for example, that most products apparently don't do anything, but are merely "designed to" do things, and that the thing they are most often designed to do is to "support" something. Barry spends a whole page detailing the varied uses of the word support in computer writing.
There's also a chapter on the complex and inconsistent grammar of technobabble. "Any noun can be verbed," Barry quotes one author, and goes on to demonstrate, citing perhaps the first uses of "mouse" and "version" as verbs. Changing verbs into nouns is useful when talking about programming language constructs: "The install is straightforward" is not necessarily an unsuccessful attempt to write "the installation is straightforward," if it refers to a specific command or procedure named "install." Barry gives sound advice on how to deal with such constructions.
But some grammatical questions remain unresolved. To date, there is no universally accepted way to spell the -ing form of an acronym treated as a verb. Do you write PIPing or PIPPing or PIPping or pipping? And what about ROMed code, or is it ROMMed or ROMmed or rommed or ROM'd? Those of us who use these terms from beyond Babblegate need some standards. Barry's book, which doesn't have all the answers but which identifies most of the questions, comes at a good time.
Copyright © 1991, Dr. Dobb's Journal