Tag Archives: computer terms

Not Raining but Poring

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Nobody seems to look for anything these days, if my favorite newspaper, The New York Times, is any indication. A small selection from just a couple of days in April 2015:

  • CIA analysts  “poring over drone video feeds, satellite data, electronic intercepts of cellphone conversations and informants’ reports.”
  • A writer “on her couch, poring over a new story.”
  • Football coaches “poring over game film and scouting reports” before the draft (for players, not for combat).
  • American “business and investment lawyers poring over the mash-up of laws in the existing trade embargo” of Cuba.
  •  Angora rabbit fans (who knew they existed?)  “who spend time coddling the rabbits and poring over their pedigrees.”
  • The South Korean government, “poring over private chats” in an invasion of privacy.

I’m not sure what to make of all this poring, which, by the way, is not related to climate change. “To pore over” is “to read or study carefully, in an attempt to remember,” according to one dictionary. That definition doesn’t seem to be the operative one lately. Instead, poring over is the new sifting through — checking a mountain of information for just the right fact. Not that sifting through has gone away entirely. I got more than 4000 hits when I searched for “poring” in the NY Times site, and a slightly higher number for “sifting through.” In the last two weeks, jurors were “sifting through” evidence in a high-profile murder case, a scholar was commended for “sifting through” early Modernist works, and an actor was depicted as “sifting through television and film scripts” in search of a new project. An employer was “sifting through resumes” and someone else was “sifting her memory for clues about her father’s secrets.”

And then there’s data mining. Can’t you just picture  data miners, wearing reading glasses instead of helmets with those little headlights, poring over their algorithms, hoping to uncover something of value? The gold nugget, so to speak. Before data mining I often read about people massaging the data to find patterns. I’m not exactly sure what you do when you massage the data, but it sounds like a lot more fun than poring over or sifting through.

All these terms, though, mirror how overwhelmed we are. Documents, film, audio tapes, and rabbit pedigrees — how are we to keep up? The haystack keeps getting taller and the needle smaller. Me, I’ll just keep looking.

A Phabulous Invention

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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.