Technology is a language-generating machine. With letters, phonemes, prefixes, suffixes, and existing words as its raw materials, technology constantly manufactures shiny new acronyms, words, and phrases to describe its onrushing supply of new ideas, processes, and products. Yes, the nexus of electronics, computing, communications, and Internet technologies has been the prime language mover over the past decade or three, but technology has always stamped out new words at an impressive clip. Most of these terms remain warehoused within the narrow tech communities that defined them.
However, some are shipped out on the linguistic equivalents of planes, trains, and automobiles and get distributed far and wide. A few of these even morph into general-purpose words and phrases. For example, the railroads gave us terms such as derail, sidetrack, streamline, and pick up steam; the car industry donated spark plug, bypass, blow a gasket, and rev up; aviation contributed push the envelope, automatic pilot, bail out, and gremlin; radio spun off flip side, fine-tune, and stereo; and nuclear technology provided us with ground zero, fall-out, and meltdown.
But even though technology has always been a kind of new-word assembly line, what's different these days is that technology is cranking out fresh terms at a rate that has gone from merely geometric to downright exponential. That's not because people are doing more neologizing in their spare time. No, it's because we now have more technology than ever. We don't just have telephones, we have mobile phones, pagers, satellite phones, and wireless devices. We don't just have computers, we have desktops, servers, notebooks, palmtops, PDAs, and Internet appliances. New gadgets, new technologies, new services, and new ideas stride purposefully down Technology Road every day, each one pulling a bright red wagon full of newly minted words and phrases.
And not only have an amazing number of new technologies appeared in the past decade or two, but their associated techno-coinages now have a super-efficient method of propagation: the electronic byways of e-mail, chat rooms, instant messaging, and the Web. In the pre-Internet world, new words would tend to stay within the cultural tributary that coined them, and only a few would get swept out into the mainstream. Now there is a subculture — the Internet and its adjunct technologies — that includes hundreds of millions of people, and so by definition is part of the mainstream. This means it doesn't take much for new words and phrases to catch on.
Keeping up with this deluge of newfangled technical terms will be the future focus of the Technically Speaking column. I'll examine new words and phrases that have jumped down from their technological niches and are poised to set up shop in the broader piazza of general language use.
That's not to say that every new word gets the "household" adjective attached to it. The course of a word's career is difficult to predict. A rare few catch a break by being associated with some large pop culture phenomenon. (Seinfeld alone is responsible for the otherwise-inexplicable popularity of terms such as mimbo, close-talker, and spongeworthy, not to mention the renewed popularity of older phrases such as yadda yadda yadda.) But a slow, undignified slide into linguistic obscurity is the fate of most new coinages.
I definitely won't be writing about stunt words. A stunt word is a form of nonce word (a word made up specially for a single occasion); it's a word coined in an act of conspicuous cleverness by someone who is merely showing off. Stunt words, although they're often fun, rarely make it into the linguistic mainstream, so they're not usually very interesting. Of much greater interest are real words or phrases that people are actually using and that have had some measure of acceptance (as indicated by appearances in newspapers, magazines, and other media).
Holes in the language
Most likely, you'll see a lot of guests from my favorite neological clique, the gap-fillers—words that fill a hole in the language. They're coined out of necessity because no existing word or phrase aptly describes or names some object or phenomenon. Technologies tend to create language gaps. For example, what would you call a verbal error made while using a voice recognition system? Well, let's see: If a mistake made while typing is a typo, then a mistake made while speaking could be called, what, a speako? Sure enough, that word has been around since about 1995. Here are some other gaps that have been filled in recently:
- What might you call a person who seeks to change some aspect of society and who has the high level of technical expertise required to make that change? Try evangineer (evangelist plus engineer; this one was coined in 1999).
- What would you call the accidental transmission or display of private online data to a third-party? How about a data spill (a play on oil spill; this one's from 2000).
- What's the term for a young, malicious cracker who isn't smart enough or skilled enough to create custom cracking software? Call him or her a kiddiot (2000) or a script kiddie (1996).
If you hear an interesting new word or phrase in your technological travels, please don't hesitate to pass it along for possible inclusion in a future post.
This post appeared originally as my Technically Speaking column in the June 2002 issue of IEEE Spectrum. I'll be posting these columns more or less weekly over the next few months.