The Language of the Digitally Hip   

Exploring the jargon of the online world.

Exploring the jargon of the online world.

When it comes to print usage of lingo lifted from the digital realm, the abject illiteracy of many journalists becomes strikingly apparent.

As new media increasingly infiltrate every aspect of the journalist's purview, reporters and editors alike are finding it difficult to keep up with the burgeoning lexicon of the much-hyped "digital revolution."

Multimedia style guides and digital dictionaries aimed at alleviating this electronic inarticulateness are being added to many reporters' bookshelves, mostly in vain. By the time word meets pulp, a new vocabulary has already emerged, leaving print scribes writing in anachronism.

Witness print publications' overuse of the prefix "cyber," a trend that inspires much snickering in online newsrooms, along with the proliferation of words beginning with the now token prefixes "tech- no-," "digi-" or "hyper-." Even the term "cyberspace," coined by William Gibson in his 1984 science fiction novel "Neuromancer," has become a cliché, as has Vice President Al Gore's 1978 coinage, "information superhighway."

Gore's construction sounded fully futuristic at the time, but today's media — both new and traditional — have all but worn it out with endless metaphors involving traffic jams, gridlock, on-ramps and collision courses.

Indeed, in their efforts to demonstrate their presence on the linguistic bleeding edge, print journalists often overlook the fact that Internet culture is dictated by its immediacy, and as a result is a victim of its own faddishness. The verbiage of online journalism is evolving at such a rapid pace that it is becoming increasingly difficult to impart that tech-savvy ring to words in print.

This holds especially true for the definitions provided by dictionaries of digital idioms.

The "digerati" (a word that lost its cachet the moment it first appeared in the mainstream media) seem to follow unwritten rules. Even the anointed, the "cognoscenti," have trouble keeping up, but some of them still try to codify and legitimize their vernacular.

Their guides often serve more as tipsheets to the words one should refrain from using to avoid getting "flamed." But their irreverence is amusing, as are their heavy-handed efforts to distinguish between digitally hip language and that of the "analog" world. (That's analog as in, "I don't read newspapers; they're just too analog for me," according to the definition provided by one online dictionary.)

Such reference works fall short of being definitive, but do make for a good read.

Never mind that the title of "Cyberspeak," by Mac-User magazine columnist Andy Ihnatko, breaks the first rule of tech talk by touting the gratuitous "cyber" prefix. Inside, "flaming" is defined as "Responding to a public message with the sort of bile and venom which is only appropriate when someone makes scandalous and unforgiving remarks regarding your mother." Who might get flamed? A "smurf" or "smurfette": "Someone who posts regularly on a newsgroup or forum but rarely adds anything substantive to the conversation." Hardly definitions one would find in Webster's, but instructive nevertheless.

Other "Netiquette" tips are revealed in "Wired Style: Principles of Usage in the Digital Age," perhaps the closest thing to a bible of online etymology, from perhaps the most self-consciously cutting-edge of all technology publications. Even the table of contents speaks to the book's cliquish tone, with section titles that sound more like initiation rites — "Be Elite," "Transcend the Technical," "Capture the Colloquial" — than practical rules for becoming bilingual in the computer age.

One chapter, "Grok the Media," points up a curious sociological aspect of the evolution, or "morphing," of Netspeak. Defining the term "to grok" as "a verb meaning to scan all available information regarding a situation, digest it and form a distilled opinion," the guide goes on to explain that grokking is "just another example of language that percolates from the fiction world into the high-tech world and the mainstream."

Either that, or it is a shining example of the desecration of all that journalists hold sacred. Granted, Tom Wolfe artfully infused the word "grok" into works that now are revered in J-schools for touching off the literary journalism movement, but the practice of conspicuously littering copy with impenetrable techie slang can be a slippery slope. Too often, it leads to spinoff terms once used only by people derisively called geeks, the same people now labeled with the cutesy and tired construction "geek chic."

The rampant use of the suffix "-ware," or the plural, "-warez" (the pop-culture spelling sure to make copy editors cringe and spell-checkers tilt) is one example that comes to mind. "Software" and "hardware" are household words these days, so any new media writer worth his modem connection takes pains to pepper his copy with terms like "vaporware," defined as, "software that never makes it off the drawing board"; "wank-ware," defined as "X-rated software"; "pimpware," defined as "a derisive term for a download that is putatively a useful piece of software in its own right, but actually is part of some huge marketing campaign"; or "wetware," defined as "the hideously unreliable computing and processing apparatus, if any, installed between your ears," aka the brain.

Clearly, so-called multimedia dictionaries will never lack material from which to draw as the high-tech community continues to propagate technobabble and its attendant acronyms at breakneck speed.

Given computer culture's inevitable imprint on news, journalists should be aware of, if not heed, the style rules of "cyberspace," defined by one new-media dictionary as "What cyberpunks and Newsweek