Technobabble

About this book

The computer revolution like many of the technologies that preceded is producing an abundance of new terms and catchphrases that are making their way into the English language. In this lively account computerese expert John A. Barry chronicles an important linguistic development which he has termed technobabble: the pervasive and indiscriminate use of computer terminology especially as it is applied to situations that have nothing at all to do with technology. Technobabble examines the new computer lexicon from an etymological historical and anecdotal perspective. It reveals technobabbles origins among the high priests of the advanced research laboratories of the 1950s describing the folkways by which this sublanguage becomes incorporated into the vocabulary of the larger society and predicting some of the new dimensions technobabble is likely to assume in coming years. Barry details the technobabble style which is characterized by logorrhea excessive use of the passive voice anthropomorphism vague and abstract language euphemism obfuscation solecism synecdoche and mangled metaphors. And he delves into technobabbles sexual pharmacological political religious and other connotations. Perhaps one of the most troubling implications of this new style of communicating Barry points out is that technobabble tends to apply a mechanistic lexicon to human interaction while describing computer processes in human terms. These days for example many people do not merely converse with one another; they interface. (Computers on the other hand are said to talk to each other.) It is not uncommon to hear people refer to their leisure hours as downtime. In CaliforniasSilicon Valley (the wellspring of much of the technobabble lexicon) getting something off ones chest is also known as core-dumping. Conversely computers are described as thinking and remembering and computer programs are commonly given the pronoun he. John A. Barry is the coauthor of nine books including the best-seller Sunburst: The Ascent of Sun Microsystems. He is editor-in-chief of SunWorld magazine for which he writes lex a computer language column.