Of Babbages and Bings and why should computer people want to be understood anyway?The computer industry is second only to the trades union movement in using such impenetrable jargon that most of its practitioners can’t understand much of what is being said, let alone unfortunate outsiders, and comes some way ahead of lawyers, whose jargon is at least rooted in venerable Latin. (Of course Australians have turned the same tendency into a national characteristic, so that most people would need an interpreter to explain that We’re inviting the garbos and the Salvos’ musos to our Crimbo barbie at the uni this arvo – but at least it’s colourful.) Not only is the computer industry’s addiction to jargon a sign of a terrible inferiority complex, it betrays a deplorable lack of imagination as one acronym – LAN, WAN, 4GL, OSF, CASE, CAD/CAM – after another lands with a dull thud. In the cause of brighter computing, we propose a revolution in computing terminology, and, recalling that the inventor of the analytical engine (not the AE), Charles Babbage, was born at the Elephant & Castle in south-east London, and would have grown up with the sound of Cockney rhyming slang ringing in his ears, we propose that the informaticians henceforth follow the principles of that ingenious language when they dream up new shorthand to ensure that outsiders remain ignorant of what they are speaking. For the uninitiated, in rhyming slang, you find a phrase in which one of the nouns rhymes with the one in question, and adopt its companion as the new name. Scapa – Scapa Flow, Go; Titfer, tit-for-tat, hat; barnet, Barnet Fair, hair; whistle, whistle and flute, suit; cobblers, cobbler’s awls, and so forth. Plunging straight in, a chip becomes a cheese – cheese dip; a printer becomes an Olympic – sprinter; a disk becomes a MIPS – MIPS RISC; MIPS become tempting – tempting lips, and so forth. Cobol is obviously bowling, bowling a no ball. And the phone is already taken care of – Cockneys call it the dog – dog and bone. Screens are clearly nasties – mean and nasty.
