WAYS WITH WORDS

Dick Pountain/18 January 2008/11:41/Idealog 162

Words matter a great deal to me, for several reasons. Most obviously because I write for a living, less obviously (to you) because reading is my favourite pastime, and because being an editor gives me some control over the words that others employ. Since I've also written a dictionary I must be a member of that shadowy institution some people call the "word police", but if so I'd protest that I'm a very liberal policeman. I'm far more interested in slang, jargon and other forms of technical, marginal and subversive language than I am in maintaining any orthodoxies. 

As an example, I've been fascinated in recent years by the way mainstream words get turned into slang by truncation. You can clip a word from either end, but which actually happens seems to be subject to fashion. In the '60s slang words were mostly made by chopping tails off, as in "tele" from "television", "porn" from "pornography" or "vibe" from "vibration". Nowadays however the yoot truncate words by chopping their heads off, for example "za" for "pizza", "shrooms" for "mushrooms" and "blog" for "weblog". So a permanent sea-change of slangification modes? No sir, because if you look back to Victorian times you'll find "bus" from "omnibus" and "phone" from "telephone", head-chopped just like today. More like a pendulum than a sea-change.

I was approached early on by the makers of the BBC's "Balderdash and Piffle" series over a quotation in my book about Cool, and was encouraged that they wanted to show viewers the process by which words are accepted into the Oxford Dictionary (which in this country is the the ultimate stamp of authority). However I was quite disappointed by the series that finally emerged, almost a game show with celeb presenters on treasure-hunt style quests - it concentrated solely on earliest recorded usage rather than on evidence for widespread usage, and the entry for "cool" was particularly poor.

Word usage affects my job editing PC Pro's Real World section, whenever significant new jargon terms are coined and we have to decide when to incorporate them into the magazine's house style. The last big example was the term "Wi-Fi", which all our Real World contributors resisted stoutly for several years, preferring to refer to it by the IEEE standard number 802.11b (as it then was). This was partly because, being techies, they like to call things by their proper name, partly because of the slightly tabloid, populist ring to Wi-Fi, and after 2003 probably because Wi-Fi became a brandname of the Wi-Fi Alliance. To show what a sloppy sort of policeman I am, my suggestion that we adopt "Wi-Fi" was voted down at several consecutive contributor's meetings, until sometime around 2005 the term entered public parlance to the point where it was appearing in daily newspapers and the TV news, and the RWC contributors started to use it spontaneously without any editorial edict. That's how language works, by evolution and consensus rather than by decree, as the French academy may have learned from its long, bitter and fruitless struggle against Franglais.

I'm currently involved with another rather significant change in word usage, though I realise that my chances of affecting this change are about the same as a Coke can's chance of halting a steamroller. This time it isn't a brand name or an abbreviation but an attempt to change the identity of a whole profession. I'm talking about the substitution of the word "developer" for the word "programmer" to describe a person who writes computer programs. This change has been creeping in gradually over the last three years or so, and has now reached the point that all the RWC contributors prefer developer to programmer.

This time it's me who's been resisting the change, and for what I consider excellent reasons. My main problem is that the associated verb "develop" is rather vague and ambiguous, as is the noun "development" which can just mean any event or happening: neither term is as precise as "program" or "code" and as a result long passages dotted with these three D-words may leave a reader unsure whether code is being written or things are just happening. I also have more aesthetic objections because to me "developer" has two unpleasant connotations: a smelly liquid that you pour into dishes in a darkroom, or a smug and well-fed gentleman in an astrakhan-collared overcoat who buys nice old pubs and turns them into bijou flatlets. On the other hand I associate "programmer" with Donald Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming" and Niklaus Wirth's "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs", an honourable and semi-scientific profession. Of course I'm on a losing wicket here because the keenness that erstwhile programmers display in renaming themselves as developers suggests to me that very basic stuff like self-esteem, or perhaps even fees, are involved here. I blame that Alexei Sayle who used to perform fake folk-songs about computer programmers drinking real ale in Milton Keynes, making it into a term of abuse, a shameful label of uncoolness associated with the wearing of ponytails and Birkenstocks. And it may be too late ever to make programming cool again. Which brings me back to the meaning of that word "cool"...

[Dedicated to David Robins (1944-2007) co-author of "Cool Rules"]