That's Edutainment

A meditation on the repurposing of language

©1995, The Boston Globe

No institution -- not even law enforcement or the military -- mangles our language with quite the enthusiasm of the new technology establishment.

Have you been edutained lately? There was a time, you see, when words had meaning, but now they're being repurposed. The people who take information that was collected with one objective and repurpose it, i.e., use it for something else, are doing the same to our vocabulary.

In this, my final column for Plugged In, I deliberately expose a few of the terms I have struggled to keep out of this space since the page began. I confess that graphical user interface crept in once, the contribution of an editor who thought it helped clarify something.

But I'm sure you never caught me using solution, support or issue in their revised, nonstandard meanings.

I get several calls a week from people who claim to have produced new hardware or software solutions. They never mention what problem their products were designed to solve.

The solution nonetheless will support Windows 95, I'm told, or perhaps OLE2 (pronounced OH-lay too), as if those standards needed its help. What they mean is their product will work in the new electronic environments defined by those standards without crashing or screwing up your system.

If it does behave badly, such as the program that printed all the addresses for our Christmas cards last weekend but lopped off any name or street it deemed inconveniently long, that's not a problem, a bug, a fault or a flaw; it's an issue.

For instance, when I called Microsoft's technical support line recently to report that Windows 95 would not run on the particular computer I was using, I was told there was ``a known issue'' with that machine. In other words, they already knew it wouldn't work.

The Apple Newton is smaller than a laptop computer and too big to fit in your pocket. It has its own form factor.

The next time somebody proposes to modem me something I'm going to pretend I don't speak the language.

Lest you think I'm just being a curmudgeonly stick-in-the-mud, I hasten to say I rather like the term way cool to describe something an earlier generation might have called really neat, or perhaps simply: cool. It's like riding in the way back.

I suppose people who write code in computer languages can be called authors if they want to be, but I don't approve of software developers selling them authoring tools. We're not talking about pens and pencils here, either. An authoring tool is a computer program that makes it easier for a programmer to write software without using code.

I've been pounding on the keys of a computer longer than I ever did on a typewriter, but I still call it typing. Nobody ever taught me to keyboard, although there now seem to be classes that people can take to acquire a skill called keyboarding.

Some words employed to describe new phenomena on the electronic frontier have made the transition without objection.

Perhaps a stickler would say that browser ought to refer to the person doing the browsing on the World Wide Web instead of to the class of software that enables us to browse, but I wouldn't pick that nit. The person, after all, is a net surfer, not a browser. That's okay, too.

Nor do I have any objection to use of the word firewall to describe the electronic device designed to keep hackers from rummaging about in computers where they're not welcome. There doesn't have to be a fire to make them necessary.

I bristle, however, when people describe what I write as content. Call it good or bad, but don't call it by a name that is applied with equal indifference to advertising, news releases, weather forecasts, computer programs or anything else that can be reduced to digital form and moved across a network.

It's written in the job description of writers--perhaps even in the gene map--that they should abhor editors, who cut their copy to shreds, take out the best lines and murder their most precious metaphors. Yet, writers as well as editors must cringe in the brave world of the Internet, where anyone can publish anything without benefit of editing.

The language we use is being butchered Out Here by electronic publishers who think they don't need editors because they have spell-checking programs. Frequently, they don't even use those.

We may one day regret we dispensed with the rule that holds a second pair of eyes can see mistakes the first pair missed. But by then we'll be buried under so much so-called information it will be impossible to find the pearls of wisdom hidden there.

--The Boston Globe, December 21, 1995