Silicon Insider: The Leet Guide for Noobs and Nubs

Feb. 16, 2006 — -- Great technological innovations change the culture, and that in turn changes the language.

This almost always happens imperceptibly and from the ground up. Some small group or industry will begin creating new words to deal with new experiences, and those words will circulate within that crowd for months, even years. Then, as that industry takes off and bursts into the public eye, its argot goes with it. Suddenly, a word you overheard just last week for the first time is showing up everywhere: on television, at cocktail parties, in the press. Cool people use it knowingly, books are written about it, consultants appear to make sure you have it, and courses are taught in it at universities.

And then, just as suddenly, it is gone. Keep it in your vocabulary for a week too long and people look at you like you're some retro-philistine, or, at best, an amusing anachronism -- like the guy who still said "23-skidoo" in 1950, or "groovy" in 1985. Sometimes, the word or phrase will reappear years later in an adulterated or ironic form -- as with the regular, bi-generational appearance of the term "cool," which has meant something entirely different, yet always the same, each time it's returned to general use.

In tech, words are often created in a manner that matches the personalities of engineers. Thus the much-remarked conversion of verbs into nouns and vice versa (input, download, link, etc.), grafting ("blog" from web log), and mech-anthropomorphism ("I had him do a core dump on everything he knew"), and transfer ("hacker" from amateur golfer, to impostor, to illegal phone pirate to software intruder to Internet vandal). Techno-speak is particularly rich with neologisms because it is the fastest-changing industry there is. Simply put, it needs new words all the time. One can assume that was true for early radio 80 years ago, and will be true for bioengineering and nanotech 20 years from now.

The great discoverers, creators and disseminators of new words are, of course, kids. There are a number of reasons for this, I think: They are out there on the cutting edge of social experimentation, they are obsessed with new technologies, they don't always hear traditional words properly or confuse their definitions (call it the Norm Crosby effect), and they often don't want adults to understand what they are talking about.