How compubabble is cheapening English
February 1998
SF Weekly Online
Bacronymlash
A MINISTRY CALLED the General Delegation for the French Language was organized in Paris in 1989 as an outpost of official resistance against a rising tide of English in Europe. Since at least last year, when it released an official memo on "information systems," the délégation has been devoted specifically to saving French from the immigration of American compubabble by replacing terms like "computer" with ordinateur, "e-mail" with courier électronique, "Net surfer" with internaute, and "crash" with panne totale or the elegant incident. The delegation strikes its critics as defensive, xenophobic; but it's hard to blame the French for rejecting the language exported to Europe by American computers, because a lot of it barely qualifies as English.
Germany, strangely, has been less xenophobic than France: Germans embrace American pop lingo like a Japanese teenager. Lately they've accepted the public rape of their grammar in bastard terms like backupen, multitasken, and outsourcen -- words that even in English express nothing more than a bureaucrat's imagination. "Outsource" is a corporate hybrid, like "impact" when it's used as a verb; it and its kin — RAM, ROM, e-mail, e-money, e-ticket, CD, CD-ROM, ATM, ASCII, HTML, HTTP, UNIX, AOL, "cc" (especially as a verb), "dot-com," and other formulations from digital culture and the corporate culture it fuels — now litter the language so rampantly I almost wish Congress would form a General Delegation for the English Language on the Web. This, of course, would be un-American, and no one would listen to the delegation anyway. But compubabble -- especially the ugly nonsense of acronyms, which is a much younger phenomenon than most of us realize -- is thinning the language in a way that suggests how many Americans have forgotten what language can do. The first thing to notice about techno-abbreviations is that they're based in English. CD, "e-mail," "modem" (modulator-demodulator), "com," "org," and "edu" are all convenient reductions of the language, coined without much interest in making them act like actual words, and in an era when English's roots in Latin and Greek have been largely forgotten. So the new words, in a way, are narcissistic. Compared to a fine old word like "tuber" — meaning "thick, fleshy root"; drawn from the Latin for "tumor"; related to "thumb" — they sound shallow. They don't reverberate in sound or meaning; they don't join English so much as ride it like driftwood; they hold no alluvium from the long and twisted history of the West. They are, in other words, useless to poets, who need an evocative language to work in. This may not stir the heart of a fat and bearded programmer drinking Coke behind his stack of digital junk as he thinks of an acronym to describe his new process for streaming movies, but his dead ear for poetry is exactly the reason he should be kept from having too much sway with the language. Of course, a lot of the words applied to new technologies are eloquent: "streaming" video, "burning" a CD, etc. "Spam" has a great lineage. Bricks of potted pork are a solid image for something so mass-produced; the word also sounds a little like "splat," so when I think of spam on the Internet I picture a loaf of Spam splattered on the wall. The New Hacker's Dictionary also gives the derivation "from Monty Python's Flying Circus," implying that if the English comedy troupe's skit about Spam hadn't been part of computer-nerd culture in the '70s, the word may never have become slang. "Spam" is a real word in the finest sense: It gives up color and sound, and its history offers a deeper understanding of how it should be used. From the component parts of "modem," all you get is a definition. The second thing worth noting about the worst of the new techno-terms is that they're nervous abbreviations. The modern military habit of forming acronyms ("radar" was an early one) is directly related to acronym fever in the computer industry. DOS, IBM, UNIX, etc. — this endless list has been flogged by plenty of critics, and my dour attitude toward it has been called "bacronymlash" by the computer journalist John Barry in Technobabble. The urge to make acronyms, along with the need to "save a keystroke," has led to the weird habit of initializing whole phrases: WYSIWYG stands for "what you see is what you get"; TTYTT ("to tell you the truth"), WTFIGO, ("what the fuck is going on), RTFM, ("read the fucking manual"), LAT ("lovely and talented"), and f2f ("face to face") are equally-uninspired bits of shorthand evolving from e-mail. WYSIWYG is actually prounounced by a certain class of person, usually with a wry crook in his mouth because he knows it's not fucking funny anymore. Wired's stylebook embraces this kind of slop, with a few caveats. It says, "Save a keystroke is another style commandment rooted in the way of the Net." This is one of the excuses it gives for printing the abbreviation "e-mail" as a self-standing word: "email." The other excuse is that the language is going there anyway — largely because of the sloppy way people tend to type their e-mail — so the word has passed into common-enough usage for Wired to drop the hyphen. But dropping the hyphen has two nasty results. It makes the e look short, as in "echo," or "elephant," and it turns what's nothing more than a handy initial into a prefix. This is unprecedented. Most of our prefixes have ancient sources: re-, in-, pre-, and un- derive from Latin, and the reason they derive from Latin is that they mean something in that language. The initial "e" means nothing. It stands for something else that means something. And without the hyphen it's easy to confuse with an already-existing English prefix, e- (from the Latin ex-), meaning "thoroughly" or "out," as in evaporate or erupt. Even worse, "email" leads to other corruptions, like "emoney" (sanctioned by Wired), "eticket," "eshopping," "ebill," and, maybe even by precedent, "cessay" -- for "cyber-essay" -- which looks and behaves like a word that has lost all sense of its past. Let's be clear: Words created by chopping up English — acronyms; initializations; "modem" and "email" — are fundamentally different from older, more organic English words because all they do is stand for what they mean. They don't evoke. They're just emblems, no better at what they do than any other randomly-constructed name, and they follow a military tradition of cramming letters together, monkeylike. You might point to SCUBA, and argue that it started taking on the resonances and barnacles of a real English word years ago, when people forgot it was an acronym. And you wouldn't be wrong, because of course words are mostly conventions, habits. But remember the word it beat out. Is "scuba" really better than "aqualung"? The words I despise are this-stands-for-that on the rudest level, and anyone who believes language can do nothing else is politely invited to leave the room. The editors of Wired are not so dull, but they do invoke E.D. Hirsch, Jr. -- a man who misunderstood the word "literate" when he published a book of facts called Cultural Literacy — to introduce Wired Style's section on Facts You Gotta Know to Read Wired (titled "Be Elite"). I think I see a connection, and maybe through the confusion over "literate" I can suggest a basic way to separate the living new language from the dead in the absence of our own délégation générale: "Literate" does not mean "knowledgeable." You are literate because you can grasp a principle, not because you know things. ("Computer literate," as it's commonly used, is nonsense.) If you can glean an idea from language and repeat it in a different way — if you understand connotations, connections, twisted threads of meaning — then you are literate, which means that literacy is a function of the mind, as important as logic or memory but different from them both. It is not, however, a store of information, and illiteracy can't be cured by a list of facts. The condition that can is called ignorance. In the same way, WYSIWYG is not like "tuber." You either know what WYSIWYG stands for, or you don't. It's a binary word. "Tuber" — and everything worthwhile about language — is different. Michael Scott Moore
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