Using Language More Responsibly

C reating a common language provides one of a social enter-prise's defining moments, be it a technical, scientific, or humanistic venture. The lan-guage's most obvious utility derives from its allowing a field's participants to communicate among themselves. Its importance extends beyond this function , however. More than a neutral medium through which we exchange information , language serves to identify the people who participate in an enterprise and, by its arcanism when related to the common language, sets them apart and contributes to the group identity's creation. Language establishes a disci-pline's accepted ontology, constrains and directs its admissible discourses, and establishes and enforces its ortho-doxy. Further, through its etymology, language codifies the relation between a discipline, its history, and the history of other disciplines. Languages establish their own ontologies and taxonomies, making exact translations of a word nearly impossible. A language also establishes the relations of power and solidarity inside a discipline by identifying roles and determining the statements pertinent to a given role. When used by computing profes-sionals—who these days have great social visibility—language also contributes to outsiders' perception of the direction taken by the areas of society that computers influence. It also determines whether the computing dialect will enter the everyday language and, if so, how future generations will perceive our profession. How is our creation of language progressing? Not well. Our bizarre ety-mological choices show that either we don't know how to create good words or we do know, but don't think this activity important enough to grant it much attention. For the past three centuries, scientists have understood that their disci-pline's practitioners should have a broad cultural background, which would partly manifest in the words they coin. Words like electron, from the Greek elektra, show a certain proclivity for the classics and a gusto for the creation of beautiful terms. The computing profession, at least in the US, seems an exception to the rule that people with a university degree should first and foremost be well educated. Worse, the words and expressions our profession creates clearly indicate the scarce sense of history that permeates the engineering world. INITIALISMS The most common indicator of our poor lexical literacy comes from the proliferation of acronyms. I see each acronym as a mark of defeat, a surrender of lexicon to the easy play of initials. The few brilliant acronyms aside, most of these terms provide meaningless initialisms. Assemblies of …