8. Read and discuss the article. Why do you think some people are inclined to using jargon?

Why are these bit streams of weird words more than just a conspiracy designed to confuse the innocent? Explain your opinion, using specific reasons and examples to support your answer.

CHASING THE JARGON JITTERS.

By Steve Pinker (Steven Pinker, professor of cognitive sci­ence at M.I.T., is author of The Language Instinct (HarperCollins).

RAM, ROM, MIPS, FLOPS, CPUS, IRQs, asynchronous floating­point multitasking initial­ization delimiters—why do computers breed so much godawful jargon? Is it all a bunch of incantations muttered by the wireheads to intimidate 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, plainspeaking 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 20th century demands, the first translation of microscope was "the device that makes the hyssop on the wall lock 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 trade-off. New words are manufactured by gluing old ones together, adding prefixes and suffixes and borrowing words from other languages. But as people become familiar with a term, they try to keep the attention of their listeners by abbreviating it. Frequently used words inexorably slide toward the short and opaque end of the continuum. If Benjamin Franklin were transported from the 18thcentury to the first half of this century, he could make educated guesses about the meanings of refrigerator, television and even facsimile ("make similar"). 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. But some of it is 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 whose mem­bers are 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 The New Hacker's Dictionary (M.I.T. Press) provides a glimpse of the vast lexicon that supplies the friendlier examples of our computer jargon. By analogy to a typo, absentminded hackers can make a thinko or a braino. Exiting a window on the screen is defenes­trating; leaving off the page numbers at the foot of a printed document is depedatating it ("cutting off its feet," by analogy with decapitating). A poorly designed pro­gram might be barfulous (nauseating) or display a high degree of bogosity. Such bogotified programs can be detected with that hypothetical but indispensable instru­ment, the "bogometer." Bogometers are also useful in the presence of politicians, professors with a Theory of Everything and, most of all, the dreaded suits.

The Hacker's Dictionary defines suit as follows: "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 and even more con­temptuous of their buzz word-laden ad-speak (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 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 were high school Latin homework. Instead think of the cir­cumstances in which you actually welcome jargon. You are at the parts counter at the hardware store 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 it is called a gasket! 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 metaphors that keep the lingo both trans­parent and concise and 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, flame (ful­minate self-righteously), hack, hardwired, interactive, kluge (a clumsy but service­able solution), 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, and so on. Go back even further, 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-mil-lion-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 Delegation of the French Language and the High Council of the French Lan­guage and the Francophone High Council 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 of the world of informatique must use ordinateur, logiciel, traitement des donnees, kit pret a monter, bande video promotionelle and memoire tampon.

Where has it got them? Their own technology commission estimated that using the French words increases the length of a document 20%. And English has been estimated to contain three to six times as many words as French. Some might say 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?