As a grumpy grammarian, I’m supposed to tsk-tsk changes to the language by anyone other than Shakespeare, but my reaction is more complex. I’ve been on the Internet since techies were trying to decide between “dot com” and “period com” to talk about websites. I sat on the sidelines when other grammarians waffled between “mouses” and “mice” for the plural of a computer mouse. Fortunately, the touchscreen showed up and rendered the issue moot.

I do object to the name of the latest must-have device, the “phablet,” a cross between a cellphone and a tablet, with, as far as I can tell, the worst features of each. Who named this device, which sounds like a tweeted tale by Aesop? A couple of people have claimed the credit or blame, depending on your point of view.

Yet I can’t help feeling that some computer terms have enriched the language. “The default is that we get up at 6:30 a.m.,” my early-bird husband says. “Time to reboot,” I’ll say when we’ve been stuck in a way of thinking that isn’t going anywhere.  I love words that slip from the machine to real life. Soft boot, hard boot, and even  humanware specialist are interesting concepts. I definitely need a hard boot on Monday mornings but a soft boot after work.  As I try to unravel the directions for a new piece of software, explanations from a humanware specialist help. (Not a techie? A hard boot occurs when you turn the computer on and the whole thing starts up, having been off duty for some length of time. A soft boot resets part of the system of a machine that’s already running. A humanware specialist trains people to use technology.)

Then they are the prefixes. The lowercase i  hasn’t been this popular since the first teen poetry magazine was published. Thanks, Apple, for giving us iPads and iPhones; I assume that iAddiction is next. Thanks, programmers, for popularizing kilo-, mega-, giga-, tera-, and peta- as prefixes for bytes.  After mining the ancient Greek language, techies have turned to fabricated word parts. (One prefix, yotta-, pays homage to the Star Wars’ character Yoda.) The amounts these prefixes represent seem unimaginable, except that techies have not only imagined them but also attempted to make the terms comprehensible. Did you know that the sum of five exabytes equals the number of all the words ever said during the entire span of human existence? (Source: highscalability.com)

And in this age of ecology, who could object to recycling old words to describe new situations? Such repurposing builds bridges between virtual and ordinary reality. You don’t function well when you have a virus, for example, and neither does your computer. Sadly, most human infections can’t be countered by an antivirus regimen. We just have to accept the downtime. Oh, for an escape button!

Everything new will be old someday, and everything old does not necessarily return. But as you’re tapping a stylus on your tablet, spare a thought for the ancient scribe scratching on a wax tablet with a different sort of stylus. You’re both likely to have sore forearms and fingers, just as you’re both likely to change the language. And in the end, that’s mostly a good thing.

See you in the cloud.