More about jargon

A few months ago I made a post about how much jargon gets used in my job at work, but I was reminded just now of how much jargon we ALL use in our everyday lives.

While I was working at my desk today my computer--for no obvious reason--just sort of wigged out on me. I decided the best thing to do was to reboot the thing, and while it was rebooting, in my frustration, I got on Facebook on my cell phone and posted this:

60 seconds ago the desktop on my computer seemed to freeze. I could move the mouse but no matter how many times I clicked nothing seemed to happen. 15 seconds ago my screen flashed and then Internet Explorer opened 26 times and Microsoft Word 14 times. Computers are fun!...

I posted that on Facebook where all 430 of my friends could read it. And my guess would be that--if all 430 of them DID read it (Fat chance!), 429 of them would have understood every word of the message.

As I looked at the post again just now, though, it occurred to me that if I'd sent that message to 430 people just 40 years ago, almost none of them would have had any idea what I was talking about. They would have understood pretty much every single word in the paragraph ("Internet" and "Microsoft" being the only exceptions), but they would have had NO idea what the paragraph was actually saying. To the average person in 1971, a "desktop" was part of a piece of furniture, a computer was a giant device with spinning tape decks that occupied whole wings of university buildings, a "mouse" was a rodent, and they'd have been totally stymied by what an "Internet" and a "Microsoft" were (I think, had I been an adult in 1971, I would guessed they had something to do with textiles, maybe an ultra-soft fish net or something!). Put it all together, and the 1971 person would have read the message and wondered why there was a frozen piece of furniture sitting on top of a computer, why I was moving a small rodent around and making a clicking noise, and the third sentence probably would have been utter nonsense.

Today, though, as I said, we all understand the paragraph. We've accepted all of these jargony terms into our lexicon one word at a time.