The Modern Tower of Babble
May. 20th, 2006 12:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat*[This is an updated version from the one I posted originally this morning, which was a rough draft and contained numerous typos, grammatical errors and spelling mistakes - yes the irony of that is not lost on me considering what the post is about. Nor is the fact that I'm apparently incapable of doing a simple proof-read or edit, without adding entire sentences that will most likely change the meaning of the entry- this may explain why I'm a lousey editor or beta. Or for that matter the fact that I will probably miss half the typos and misspellings - because editing online is a difficult thing. My apologies to anyone who responded to this thing before the update.]
Long week. Somewhat brain dead from part of it. Restless from the other. Spent a good portion of the week wrestling with my own internal demons. This personal essay comes from my experiences, frustrations and observations of the past week - most of which hinge on the inability to "communicate". Life's a bitch, but sometimes I think it's a bitch because of other people and our inability to agree on simple things - such as which language to communicate in and which words to use. A statement whose irony is not lost on me when the legislature of my country recently voted on whether to make English the official language of the US. Okay, thought I, but which version? So we've agreed on a language, but I doubt we'll ever agree on how we should speak it.
Everyone is taught in school to use the same language. Given the same textbooks. Okay, that is an assumption. Since school's tend to vary. So everyone who goes to the same exact school and has the same exact teacher and gets the same exact text book is taught the same exact language. I'd say that the variations in language occur because we all don't get the same teacher, the same education, go to the same exact school, have the same exact text book - heck there's a whole group of experts who believe if we did then education would be "standardized" and we'd all understand one another. In fact they are working diligently as we speak on making this so. If only life were that easy. But it's not. People will still interpret words differently, they will still learn differently, and even within the same class room with the same materials - outside experiences, outside influences - physical, emotional, and environmental - will affect how people learn to communicate to one another.
At more than one point this week, I felt the need to say, oh so politely, "I fear we are suffering from a failure to communicate" or more appropriately, we've just entered the modern version of the tower of babble. I can think of other phrases to say the same thing, but this is a public post and that would be rude. It's also an essay about communication, and words, whether we like it or not, contain all sorts of meanings.
While I am not a linguist and cannot fluently speak or write in more than one language,(heck people, English is hard enough sometimes), I was taught that words specifically finding the right words is important. Communicate in the dictionary means to impart information, it does not however state to impart information in a way so that someone else, whomever they might be, can understand it. This may explain why communications break down so often. That last bit is not stated as a necessary ingredient in the definition - actually in the dictionary I used, the American Heritage Dictionary, 21st edition, it wasn't stated at all. Apparently all that's important is conveying the information - whether or not you understand it - is your problem.
Hence the feeling of entering a Tower of Babble. Most people know what I mean when I state "tower of babble", but in case you were born under a rock or never read the Bible, tower of babble is a phrase derived from a story somewhere in the old testatment of the Bible, it should also be in the Torah (but I'm not Jewish, so wouldn't know, just guessing since it is an old testament story and not a new testament story). It's about a bunch of people who were great communicators, thought they were above God and did godless things; to punish them, God made it so that they could no longer understand one another. They were still speaking the same language, and to their knowledge still using the same words, but no one could understand them. The story has been used at times to explain the diversity of languages around the world. It is also a parable about becoming too arrogant and too proud of one's own abilities to the extent that the ability is more important than anything else. And it may be a warning or a cautionary tale about how communication can break down if we aren't careful and take it for granted.
With the dawn of the 21st Century, came the information age or information revolution. Now, unlike ever before, information is readily accessible no matter who you are or where you live. That is if you can get access to anything that is connected to the internet. If you can - you have information at your fingertips. With cell phones - you can send pictures, words, or voice messages to anyone depending on your calling plan. With some computers, you can do somewhat the same thing. No longer do we have to search through dusty card catalogues in dusty libraries to find information, we can just hop online (or go to our computer and type).
And you don't necessarily need a computer any more to do it - you can "text message" from a cell phone, send email from a small gadget that is called a blackberry and fits in the palm of your hand, also known as a palm pilot. Music can be downloaded along with tv shows and newscasts to small electronic boxes people call i-pods or MP3 players or nano's depending on the brand.
Technology has advanced to such a state that communication no longer requires paper, stamps, envelopes, or even for that matter a phone. Yet, we still can't get people to understand us. We can convey the information, but we cannot be sure others understand it.
Why?
Well, it does not help that people like to create their own sub-languages. Each group has one.
Academics have their own language, own words, phrases, that only other academics in their fields understand. These are usually obscure words that no one but a specialist uses. And when you go to school in that field - you are taught those words. There's even a book I saw at Barnes & Nobel today called 100 scientific terms every college student should know - one of which was Munchausen Syndrom - it means roughly the tendency to misdiagnosis yourself or something along those lines. [I'm not sure if I got the spelling correct - since I cannot locate the word in the dictionary. Science terms do not always make the dictionary, hence their obscurity.] Academic is a broad term that I am using to include anything that involves writing/publishing research papers, working in a college or university environment, presenting research papers to people at universities and confrenences attended by other academics, and teaching students who may or may not go on to do the same thing.
Academics aren't alone. Medical Doctors, Lawyers, Psychologists, Sociologists, Computer Programmers, Science-Fiction novelists, Editors in Publishing Houses, Fashion Designers, all these people and many others that I can't think of at the moment create their own language - a language that people outside their field do not understand. And the more they associate with people inside their chosen field and the less they associate with people outside of it, the worse it gets, to the point that they are no longer aware that they can only communicate to a limited number of people. A group of people who all share a common language or tongue. Nor do they tend to care. It is not affecting their livilihood or for that matter their relationships. They are happy inside the bubble. Conduct a social psychology experiment, separate people from each group and put these people in a room - a lawyer, an academic scholar, a doctor, a psychologist, a computer geek and voila - tower of babble. That's an oversimplification of course and it doesn't really happen quite like that, nothing ever does, which may explain why academic theory seldom works in practice regardless of how many tests you conduct.
This week I found myself in a number of conversations by email, by phone, on a discussion board, where half-way through I realized people were speaking English, but I was not always understanding what they were saying. They were using acronyms. Short-hand terms. Obscure words or words specific to their field or have a different meaning in their field from the word's ordinary meaning or usage. People often will use the same word to mean two different things. And in each case, the people speaking or writing assumed everyone knew what they were talking about, because they'd used the word or phrase so often with their contempories or friends, it had become the equivalent of the word Okay or Hello.
Examples of biz speech (my term for business speech) or acronyms:
KPI - Key Performance Indicator
STD - not to be confused with sexually transmitted disease, means Stragetic Team Development.
CYA- cover your ass
LMK- Let me know
ETA - estimated time of arrival
Examples of obscure academic and biz words:(definitions taken from the dicitionary where appropriate.)
fractals - this word means a geometric pattern that is repeated at ever smaller scales to produce irregular shapes that cannot be represented by classical geometry. (It was being used to analyze the repeating structural components in the plotting and themes of television shows - I kept confusing it with "fractured".)
dashboard - a performance monitoring system (also known as the dashboard on your car, it's called a dashboard because that's what it looks like electronically).
exegesis - critical interpretation of a text (you know you've been spending too much time with people in academia when you start to assume that everyone knows what this word means.)
Examples of legalese or lawyer speak:
herein - means literally within this paragraph or document
prima facie - at first view, on its face - basically means that the case must make sense -all the facts must be there.
reasonable man standard - literally means what a reasonable person would do under similar situations
Examples of webhead (webhead speak is my term for the language that has been created by people who spend 75% of their time on the internet and have spent so much time in chatrooms, text messaging, etc - that they've come up with a short-hand language to quickly communicate with one another without acquiring carpal tunnel syndrom in the process. Carpal Tunnel Syndrom is when you've spent too much time playing with your mouse/typing on the internet with no arm/wrist support, and your wrist has decided to give out on you or punish you for torturing it in this manner (okay that's not the medical definition but close enough). A webhead is someone who spends at least four hours a day writing and interacting online. I'm not sure I can claim responsibility for coining this term since I'm almost positive I've heard it somewhere else, just not sure where - the data in my brain is not that well indexed, I'm afraid.):
LMAO - laugh my ass off. We also have LOL (laugh out loud) and ROFL - roll on the floor laughing.
frex - for example
spoor! - no clue, maybe someone knows? There is a ship known as Spike/Door, but that's not the reference.
facepalm - apparently means that you feel like an idiot and have slapped yourself?
headdesk - also means you feel like an idiot and are hitting your head repeatedly against your desk. Or you are just really frustrated. Meanings vary.
eyeroll - someone else is an idiot or has said something idiotic
IM - some sort of text messaging? Text messaging means typing emails on a cell phone and sending them over the cell phone line to another cell phone - one catch - the other person must have a cell phone. IM is sending the same thing to a computer or live journal. Keep in mind the buttons on cell phones are tiny. To do this you either have to be very quick fingered or be great with the thumbs. As a result webhead speak is often used - since there is no way you can spell this stuff out.
download - literally means downloading something from the internet, also download information, may also mean downloading emotional information or info to the net from one's own brain
voy - a discussion board platform
troll - someone who is rude and obnoxious online and acts like they are braindead. Literally a "Troll".
Banned - literally banned from a forum or journal usually for pissing off the person who owns, runs, or manages it, although there are other reasons.
lj - live journal - a forum where people keep interlocking journals containing things they've written or taken photos of - sort of like an electronic correspondence club.
chat - a forum where people talk by typing emails rapidly back and forth otherwise known as instant messaging.
wikki - no idea. Assuming some sort of chat?
icon - a photograph or image posted alongside a journal entry denoting who the writer is.
Blog - another word for journal
BTW - means between us (I used to think it meant by the way, it may still mean that depending on the user)
*cough*karma*cough* (or cough (whatever word you don't want someone to hear or are muttering beneath your breath cough) - a phrase first picked up from a TV show as far as I know and now used sporadically amongst people online.
beta - editor - someone who proofs your work before you post it online. I, for instance, never have my work betaed before posting it. It can be used as a noun or verb.
fanspeak
Spuffy - spike/buffy - the romantic pairing of two characters from a cult tv show that ended in 2003 called Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Spike is a vampire, Buffy a vampire slayer - the word connotes a romantic pairing between the two.
Slash - fanfiction written about characters from books or tv shows that were never paired together, they may have hinted at a pairing, but it never ever happened.
fanfic - basically writing stories about characters or a world created by someone else in a book or tv show or movie that the writer adores. These can be shared with other people or never leave the writer's home. Examples of fanfic that have been written and published include Ahab's Wife and The Wide Sacrasso Sea but these were off of novels that had entered the public domain. Most fanfic relates to TV shows or movies and tends to involve characters that are not in the public domain.
het - slash fanfiction that deals with heterosexual pairings, most slash tends to be homoesexual, hence the need for the term "het".
Ship - shorthand for a romantic relationship between two people that the writer of email/post/fanfic/etc is rooting to end up together. Usually these two people are fictional characters, but they don't have to be.
Realfic - writing fanfic about real-life celebrities, fantasizing about their lives and writing stories about them. Examples of realfic that have been published include numerous novels about Elvis and one about Marilyn Monroe by Joyce Carol Oats.
Okay, that's long enough of a list to give you an idea of what I'm talking about here. How do you know that you spend far too much time inside one little cubby hole of people? When you start thinking everyone knows the meaning of the words above. Course it may not matter if you never plan to talk to anyone outside of that group or use those words in another setting.
We create sub-languages, without realizing it sometimes, I think - and this causes communication to break down. People assume they know the meaning of a word based on the context - but often when you enter an online forum, you don't realize you are coming into the middle of the conversation, that the rules, lingo, etc have already been established. It's like joining a game already in progress. You feel a bit like a troll or a big giant stumbling about, trying to keep yourself from running into people and stepping on toes. I know that's how I feel every time I try to post on discussion boards nowadays, don't have the time or energy to spend the hours others do - so I lurk and pop in from time to time. And in the old days, back when this whole thing was new, you could do that. Now, not so easy, people have come up with a language for their groups. And if you don't know the language, you can't really converse, you cannot be understood. Communicating is fine and dandy, but if the information is not understood - what is the point?
It's the toughest job for a translator whenever they translate one language into another, keeping the meaning from the original language intact in the cross-over. It's not just a matter of translating words and syallbles, but meaning. I remember when I took French - I went to France for two months one summer and I had a terrible time, finally, I threw up my hands and went by body language to interpret what was being said. Part of the problem, of course, was I'd been taught Parisian French or textbook French and I was staying with a family that lived in Bretagne or Brittany, and spoke a combination of Bretagne ( a celtic language with roots in Wales/Scotland and Ireland) and French. After a while I was able to translate meaning, not just words. And it was a struggle, because I cannot distinguish certain sounds - which change the meaning of certain words. For some words in some languages, it is all about the pronounciation - how you say the word not how it is spelled or written but how it is spoken. Cherokee is like that - my niece's middle name is (and I doubt I have the spelling right) Kokahomma - it means both butterfly and elephant in that language - depending on which cosonant you emphasize, vocal inflection, and hand gestures. It's not unlike the acronyms and words listed above. STD can mean sexually transmitted disease or strategic development team. Fractal can mean a repetitive pattern with irrelgular shapes in geometry or the repetive but not exact pattern in story structure and themes. It depends on the speaker, the context, the words surrounding it.
James Joyce and William Faulkner are two writers who played with this idea. Played with how words are used and how their usage changes their meaning. Neither were very good communicators and the books they used to play with words the most, Finnegan's Wake and Sound and The Fury, are deemed unreadable by the vast majority of people. They were only able to communicate their views to a small portion of people - people who for some reason or other, understood the lingo or language. "Grokked" it as the phrase from Robert Heinlein's bestselling sci-fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land states. Grok basically means understand completely, on all levels with no possibility of misunderstanding. Understand intuitively and intellectually at the same time.
We take the ability to understand what someone else says and the ability to make someone else understand what we say for granted sometimes. Or as Heinlein might put it - "grokking". It is a skill I've worked hard at, my entire life. I'm still rusty. I still struggle. I still run into misunderstandings. I still suffer from a failure to understand and a failure to get someone else to understand. (As this essay possibly indicates.) The words don't always cooperate with me. And it is not entirely my fault, it takes two after all to converse. Two to understand. And there are so many variables in play. Everyone brings their own baggage, their own agenda to every conversation. As an old fiction teacher once taught me - every conversation is about people jockeying or fighting for position, control.
Listening is not an easy skill either. And goes hand in hand with communicating. I think babble occurs when the listener loses the ability to follow the conversation or the wherewithall to try to. They lose interest, much as you may have lost interest in this post. When you lost interest, words blur into one another and become nothing more than symbols on a page with no meaning, sounds in an ear - discordant, hissing, white noise. The trick of the person attempting to be understood is to appeal to the listener - to find a way to get their attention, to hold it, and to maintain it. And that my friends is a gift and requires more than an ability to spin words or make them up or make them matter, but to make them understood to someone who you have no knowledge of.
When you do make them understood - that's magic. You know the moment you read a book by a perfect stranger and they've written something that speaks to your soul, your core, your entire self or whatever you wish to call this. They've read your mind. And if you find evidence that you did not misinterpret that - then you feel as if you've found a friend, regardless of whether you ever meet face to face. That is the power of communication done well.
When it falls apart, when the words become babble, then chaos erupts and we have the biblical story retold. Words blur and become meaningless and you lose the ability to communicate your ideas outside of the bubble.
I'm not sure how to avoid the tower of babble. How to make someone understand what I write. Is it as simple as defining a word occassionally? Or finding a word that they are more likely to know, even if it is not necessarily the best one? There was a controversial movement some time ago to do away with legalese in contracts. It was abandoned because attorneys (lawyers) argued that the wording was needed to ensure that the intent was understood by an outside party - in this case a legal outside party or judge. It sounds oddly contradictory. They want to be understood, so they keep the language that only someone who has gone to law school and passed the bar may understand? Yet, it is the same motive any number of professions have. It's not that we can't communicate or make one another understand - it may be that we subsconsciously or consciously don't want everyone to understand, so we deliberately create ways of keeping people out of our conversations, yet at the same time, say, that that is not our intent.
We live in the information age, yet, we are wary of who to communicate to. Humans are odd creatures - social, yet not social, self-hating and self-loving, great communicators and great babblers...a contradiction in terms, hunting balance.
Okay, off to eat lunch. Once again I think I babbled beyond the appropriate ending.
Long week. Somewhat brain dead from part of it. Restless from the other. Spent a good portion of the week wrestling with my own internal demons. This personal essay comes from my experiences, frustrations and observations of the past week - most of which hinge on the inability to "communicate". Life's a bitch, but sometimes I think it's a bitch because of other people and our inability to agree on simple things - such as which language to communicate in and which words to use. A statement whose irony is not lost on me when the legislature of my country recently voted on whether to make English the official language of the US. Okay, thought I, but which version? So we've agreed on a language, but I doubt we'll ever agree on how we should speak it.
Everyone is taught in school to use the same language. Given the same textbooks. Okay, that is an assumption. Since school's tend to vary. So everyone who goes to the same exact school and has the same exact teacher and gets the same exact text book is taught the same exact language. I'd say that the variations in language occur because we all don't get the same teacher, the same education, go to the same exact school, have the same exact text book - heck there's a whole group of experts who believe if we did then education would be "standardized" and we'd all understand one another. In fact they are working diligently as we speak on making this so. If only life were that easy. But it's not. People will still interpret words differently, they will still learn differently, and even within the same class room with the same materials - outside experiences, outside influences - physical, emotional, and environmental - will affect how people learn to communicate to one another.
At more than one point this week, I felt the need to say, oh so politely, "I fear we are suffering from a failure to communicate" or more appropriately, we've just entered the modern version of the tower of babble. I can think of other phrases to say the same thing, but this is a public post and that would be rude. It's also an essay about communication, and words, whether we like it or not, contain all sorts of meanings.
While I am not a linguist and cannot fluently speak or write in more than one language,(heck people, English is hard enough sometimes), I was taught that words specifically finding the right words is important. Communicate in the dictionary means to impart information, it does not however state to impart information in a way so that someone else, whomever they might be, can understand it. This may explain why communications break down so often. That last bit is not stated as a necessary ingredient in the definition - actually in the dictionary I used, the American Heritage Dictionary, 21st edition, it wasn't stated at all. Apparently all that's important is conveying the information - whether or not you understand it - is your problem.
Hence the feeling of entering a Tower of Babble. Most people know what I mean when I state "tower of babble", but in case you were born under a rock or never read the Bible, tower of babble is a phrase derived from a story somewhere in the old testatment of the Bible, it should also be in the Torah (but I'm not Jewish, so wouldn't know, just guessing since it is an old testament story and not a new testament story). It's about a bunch of people who were great communicators, thought they were above God and did godless things; to punish them, God made it so that they could no longer understand one another. They were still speaking the same language, and to their knowledge still using the same words, but no one could understand them. The story has been used at times to explain the diversity of languages around the world. It is also a parable about becoming too arrogant and too proud of one's own abilities to the extent that the ability is more important than anything else. And it may be a warning or a cautionary tale about how communication can break down if we aren't careful and take it for granted.
With the dawn of the 21st Century, came the information age or information revolution. Now, unlike ever before, information is readily accessible no matter who you are or where you live. That is if you can get access to anything that is connected to the internet. If you can - you have information at your fingertips. With cell phones - you can send pictures, words, or voice messages to anyone depending on your calling plan. With some computers, you can do somewhat the same thing. No longer do we have to search through dusty card catalogues in dusty libraries to find information, we can just hop online (or go to our computer and type).
And you don't necessarily need a computer any more to do it - you can "text message" from a cell phone, send email from a small gadget that is called a blackberry and fits in the palm of your hand, also known as a palm pilot. Music can be downloaded along with tv shows and newscasts to small electronic boxes people call i-pods or MP3 players or nano's depending on the brand.
Technology has advanced to such a state that communication no longer requires paper, stamps, envelopes, or even for that matter a phone. Yet, we still can't get people to understand us. We can convey the information, but we cannot be sure others understand it.
Why?
Well, it does not help that people like to create their own sub-languages. Each group has one.
Academics have their own language, own words, phrases, that only other academics in their fields understand. These are usually obscure words that no one but a specialist uses. And when you go to school in that field - you are taught those words. There's even a book I saw at Barnes & Nobel today called 100 scientific terms every college student should know - one of which was Munchausen Syndrom - it means roughly the tendency to misdiagnosis yourself or something along those lines. [I'm not sure if I got the spelling correct - since I cannot locate the word in the dictionary. Science terms do not always make the dictionary, hence their obscurity.] Academic is a broad term that I am using to include anything that involves writing/publishing research papers, working in a college or university environment, presenting research papers to people at universities and confrenences attended by other academics, and teaching students who may or may not go on to do the same thing.
Academics aren't alone. Medical Doctors, Lawyers, Psychologists, Sociologists, Computer Programmers, Science-Fiction novelists, Editors in Publishing Houses, Fashion Designers, all these people and many others that I can't think of at the moment create their own language - a language that people outside their field do not understand. And the more they associate with people inside their chosen field and the less they associate with people outside of it, the worse it gets, to the point that they are no longer aware that they can only communicate to a limited number of people. A group of people who all share a common language or tongue. Nor do they tend to care. It is not affecting their livilihood or for that matter their relationships. They are happy inside the bubble. Conduct a social psychology experiment, separate people from each group and put these people in a room - a lawyer, an academic scholar, a doctor, a psychologist, a computer geek and voila - tower of babble. That's an oversimplification of course and it doesn't really happen quite like that, nothing ever does, which may explain why academic theory seldom works in practice regardless of how many tests you conduct.
This week I found myself in a number of conversations by email, by phone, on a discussion board, where half-way through I realized people were speaking English, but I was not always understanding what they were saying. They were using acronyms. Short-hand terms. Obscure words or words specific to their field or have a different meaning in their field from the word's ordinary meaning or usage. People often will use the same word to mean two different things. And in each case, the people speaking or writing assumed everyone knew what they were talking about, because they'd used the word or phrase so often with their contempories or friends, it had become the equivalent of the word Okay or Hello.
Examples of biz speech (my term for business speech) or acronyms:
KPI - Key Performance Indicator
STD - not to be confused with sexually transmitted disease, means Stragetic Team Development.
CYA- cover your ass
LMK- Let me know
ETA - estimated time of arrival
Examples of obscure academic and biz words:(definitions taken from the dicitionary where appropriate.)
fractals - this word means a geometric pattern that is repeated at ever smaller scales to produce irregular shapes that cannot be represented by classical geometry. (It was being used to analyze the repeating structural components in the plotting and themes of television shows - I kept confusing it with "fractured".)
dashboard - a performance monitoring system (also known as the dashboard on your car, it's called a dashboard because that's what it looks like electronically).
exegesis - critical interpretation of a text (you know you've been spending too much time with people in academia when you start to assume that everyone knows what this word means.)
Examples of legalese or lawyer speak:
herein - means literally within this paragraph or document
prima facie - at first view, on its face - basically means that the case must make sense -all the facts must be there.
reasonable man standard - literally means what a reasonable person would do under similar situations
Examples of webhead (webhead speak is my term for the language that has been created by people who spend 75% of their time on the internet and have spent so much time in chatrooms, text messaging, etc - that they've come up with a short-hand language to quickly communicate with one another without acquiring carpal tunnel syndrom in the process. Carpal Tunnel Syndrom is when you've spent too much time playing with your mouse/typing on the internet with no arm/wrist support, and your wrist has decided to give out on you or punish you for torturing it in this manner (okay that's not the medical definition but close enough). A webhead is someone who spends at least four hours a day writing and interacting online. I'm not sure I can claim responsibility for coining this term since I'm almost positive I've heard it somewhere else, just not sure where - the data in my brain is not that well indexed, I'm afraid.):
LMAO - laugh my ass off. We also have LOL (laugh out loud) and ROFL - roll on the floor laughing.
frex - for example
spoor! - no clue, maybe someone knows? There is a ship known as Spike/Door, but that's not the reference.
facepalm - apparently means that you feel like an idiot and have slapped yourself?
headdesk - also means you feel like an idiot and are hitting your head repeatedly against your desk. Or you are just really frustrated. Meanings vary.
eyeroll - someone else is an idiot or has said something idiotic
IM - some sort of text messaging? Text messaging means typing emails on a cell phone and sending them over the cell phone line to another cell phone - one catch - the other person must have a cell phone. IM is sending the same thing to a computer or live journal. Keep in mind the buttons on cell phones are tiny. To do this you either have to be very quick fingered or be great with the thumbs. As a result webhead speak is often used - since there is no way you can spell this stuff out.
download - literally means downloading something from the internet, also download information, may also mean downloading emotional information or info to the net from one's own brain
voy - a discussion board platform
troll - someone who is rude and obnoxious online and acts like they are braindead. Literally a "Troll".
Banned - literally banned from a forum or journal usually for pissing off the person who owns, runs, or manages it, although there are other reasons.
lj - live journal - a forum where people keep interlocking journals containing things they've written or taken photos of - sort of like an electronic correspondence club.
chat - a forum where people talk by typing emails rapidly back and forth otherwise known as instant messaging.
wikki - no idea. Assuming some sort of chat?
icon - a photograph or image posted alongside a journal entry denoting who the writer is.
Blog - another word for journal
BTW - means between us (I used to think it meant by the way, it may still mean that depending on the user)
*cough*karma*cough* (or cough (whatever word you don't want someone to hear or are muttering beneath your breath cough) - a phrase first picked up from a TV show as far as I know and now used sporadically amongst people online.
beta - editor - someone who proofs your work before you post it online. I, for instance, never have my work betaed before posting it. It can be used as a noun or verb.
fanspeak
Spuffy - spike/buffy - the romantic pairing of two characters from a cult tv show that ended in 2003 called Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Spike is a vampire, Buffy a vampire slayer - the word connotes a romantic pairing between the two.
Slash - fanfiction written about characters from books or tv shows that were never paired together, they may have hinted at a pairing, but it never ever happened.
fanfic - basically writing stories about characters or a world created by someone else in a book or tv show or movie that the writer adores. These can be shared with other people or never leave the writer's home. Examples of fanfic that have been written and published include Ahab's Wife and The Wide Sacrasso Sea but these were off of novels that had entered the public domain. Most fanfic relates to TV shows or movies and tends to involve characters that are not in the public domain.
het - slash fanfiction that deals with heterosexual pairings, most slash tends to be homoesexual, hence the need for the term "het".
Ship - shorthand for a romantic relationship between two people that the writer of email/post/fanfic/etc is rooting to end up together. Usually these two people are fictional characters, but they don't have to be.
Realfic - writing fanfic about real-life celebrities, fantasizing about their lives and writing stories about them. Examples of realfic that have been published include numerous novels about Elvis and one about Marilyn Monroe by Joyce Carol Oats.
Okay, that's long enough of a list to give you an idea of what I'm talking about here. How do you know that you spend far too much time inside one little cubby hole of people? When you start thinking everyone knows the meaning of the words above. Course it may not matter if you never plan to talk to anyone outside of that group or use those words in another setting.
We create sub-languages, without realizing it sometimes, I think - and this causes communication to break down. People assume they know the meaning of a word based on the context - but often when you enter an online forum, you don't realize you are coming into the middle of the conversation, that the rules, lingo, etc have already been established. It's like joining a game already in progress. You feel a bit like a troll or a big giant stumbling about, trying to keep yourself from running into people and stepping on toes. I know that's how I feel every time I try to post on discussion boards nowadays, don't have the time or energy to spend the hours others do - so I lurk and pop in from time to time. And in the old days, back when this whole thing was new, you could do that. Now, not so easy, people have come up with a language for their groups. And if you don't know the language, you can't really converse, you cannot be understood. Communicating is fine and dandy, but if the information is not understood - what is the point?
It's the toughest job for a translator whenever they translate one language into another, keeping the meaning from the original language intact in the cross-over. It's not just a matter of translating words and syallbles, but meaning. I remember when I took French - I went to France for two months one summer and I had a terrible time, finally, I threw up my hands and went by body language to interpret what was being said. Part of the problem, of course, was I'd been taught Parisian French or textbook French and I was staying with a family that lived in Bretagne or Brittany, and spoke a combination of Bretagne ( a celtic language with roots in Wales/Scotland and Ireland) and French. After a while I was able to translate meaning, not just words. And it was a struggle, because I cannot distinguish certain sounds - which change the meaning of certain words. For some words in some languages, it is all about the pronounciation - how you say the word not how it is spelled or written but how it is spoken. Cherokee is like that - my niece's middle name is (and I doubt I have the spelling right) Kokahomma - it means both butterfly and elephant in that language - depending on which cosonant you emphasize, vocal inflection, and hand gestures. It's not unlike the acronyms and words listed above. STD can mean sexually transmitted disease or strategic development team. Fractal can mean a repetitive pattern with irrelgular shapes in geometry or the repetive but not exact pattern in story structure and themes. It depends on the speaker, the context, the words surrounding it.
James Joyce and William Faulkner are two writers who played with this idea. Played with how words are used and how their usage changes their meaning. Neither were very good communicators and the books they used to play with words the most, Finnegan's Wake and Sound and The Fury, are deemed unreadable by the vast majority of people. They were only able to communicate their views to a small portion of people - people who for some reason or other, understood the lingo or language. "Grokked" it as the phrase from Robert Heinlein's bestselling sci-fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land states. Grok basically means understand completely, on all levels with no possibility of misunderstanding. Understand intuitively and intellectually at the same time.
We take the ability to understand what someone else says and the ability to make someone else understand what we say for granted sometimes. Or as Heinlein might put it - "grokking". It is a skill I've worked hard at, my entire life. I'm still rusty. I still struggle. I still run into misunderstandings. I still suffer from a failure to understand and a failure to get someone else to understand. (As this essay possibly indicates.) The words don't always cooperate with me. And it is not entirely my fault, it takes two after all to converse. Two to understand. And there are so many variables in play. Everyone brings their own baggage, their own agenda to every conversation. As an old fiction teacher once taught me - every conversation is about people jockeying or fighting for position, control.
Listening is not an easy skill either. And goes hand in hand with communicating. I think babble occurs when the listener loses the ability to follow the conversation or the wherewithall to try to. They lose interest, much as you may have lost interest in this post. When you lost interest, words blur into one another and become nothing more than symbols on a page with no meaning, sounds in an ear - discordant, hissing, white noise. The trick of the person attempting to be understood is to appeal to the listener - to find a way to get their attention, to hold it, and to maintain it. And that my friends is a gift and requires more than an ability to spin words or make them up or make them matter, but to make them understood to someone who you have no knowledge of.
When you do make them understood - that's magic. You know the moment you read a book by a perfect stranger and they've written something that speaks to your soul, your core, your entire self or whatever you wish to call this. They've read your mind. And if you find evidence that you did not misinterpret that - then you feel as if you've found a friend, regardless of whether you ever meet face to face. That is the power of communication done well.
When it falls apart, when the words become babble, then chaos erupts and we have the biblical story retold. Words blur and become meaningless and you lose the ability to communicate your ideas outside of the bubble.
I'm not sure how to avoid the tower of babble. How to make someone understand what I write. Is it as simple as defining a word occassionally? Or finding a word that they are more likely to know, even if it is not necessarily the best one? There was a controversial movement some time ago to do away with legalese in contracts. It was abandoned because attorneys (lawyers) argued that the wording was needed to ensure that the intent was understood by an outside party - in this case a legal outside party or judge. It sounds oddly contradictory. They want to be understood, so they keep the language that only someone who has gone to law school and passed the bar may understand? Yet, it is the same motive any number of professions have. It's not that we can't communicate or make one another understand - it may be that we subsconsciously or consciously don't want everyone to understand, so we deliberately create ways of keeping people out of our conversations, yet at the same time, say, that that is not our intent.
We live in the information age, yet, we are wary of who to communicate to. Humans are odd creatures - social, yet not social, self-hating and self-loving, great communicators and great babblers...a contradiction in terms, hunting balance.
Okay, off to eat lunch. Once again I think I babbled beyond the appropriate ending.
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Date: 2006-05-20 07:05 pm (UTC)It's painfully easy to be misunderstood, especially online where there are no visual or auditory clues to aid in understanding how to interpret the words we see. Even when the words are carefully chosen and the writer thinks there's no way anyone could possibly misinterpret what was written I am reminded of one of my favorite sayings: You can't make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious. But if the writer doesn't bother to try to make what is said open to as little misinterpretation as possible, then being misunderstood, or finding that the intended communication has gone badly awry, shouldn't come as too big a shock.
How to avoid it? I wish I knew. I do think it can help to define a word occasionally. I know I tend to use 'argument' in the dabate sense of making one's points, as opposed to getting into a fight, but I don't assume that everyone else does. But if I see someone saying "this is my opinion and I'm willing to discuss it but I don't want to start arguing about it" I don't think "wow, what a contradiction!" because I know they're using in the context of getting into a fight, not a debate.
And, by the way, 'wiki' refers to wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com). I have no idea what 'spoor!' means.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-20 07:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-20 10:31 pm (UTC)Or does it mean something else on teh intranets? D'oh.
;o)
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Date: 2006-05-20 11:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-21 01:31 am (UTC);o)
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Date: 2006-05-21 01:39 am (UTC)ie. of the sexually explicit arena? Or just okay/gotcha?
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Date: 2006-05-21 01:44 am (UTC)Instead of, "And Tom Cruise seemed a little crazy, naturally!" you write, "And Tom Cruise seemed a little crazy, natch!"
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Date: 2006-05-21 03:19 am (UTC)That was the only example I could come up with...
;o)
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Date: 2006-05-21 01:46 am (UTC)And then, when you spell it out like that, it doesn't look like it bears any resemblance to "naturally" at all.
Yeah, particularly with the comma in front and the spelling. For example, "And this happened, natch." I was scratching my head wondering whether "natch" was supposed to be another person, or I don't know what!
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Date: 2006-05-21 01:47 am (UTC)I guess this means I'm officially old.
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Date: 2006-05-20 11:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-21 12:02 am (UTC)Wikipedia...hmmm, how does one describe this... it's an online encyclopedia in which the entries are created and edited by anyone. Which essentially means that the accuracy varies drastically from entry to entry. I also got the url wrong because I forget when things are .org instead of .com ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page ).
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Date: 2006-05-20 10:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-20 11:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-21 12:57 am (UTC)I find face to face conversation to be so much easier, because you can usually 'read' whether or not the other person knows what you are saying.
I had a funny experience in Spain (I was taking a course there which was taught in English...I spoke no Spanish, however I had learned to order 'coca cola and garlic bread' in Spanish with a good local accent):
I sat at the bar, ordered my coke & toast, and the man behind the bar started talking away...and I knew for sure he was complaining about his wife and/or kids, without understanding a word. So I was nodding and looking sympathetic.
He suddenly stopped, and said something which I knew would have translated into something like: 'you don't understand me, do you?'
and again, I smiled and shrugged. Then we both laughed....
Because sometimes, very rarely, you can communicate without ever understanding one word.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-21 09:03 am (UTC)At the opposite extreme, trying to communicate with autistic children has made me aware of how difficult even ordinary language can be to pick up. One strategy I’ve been taught to use is to draw little pictures to help get things across. But what to draw. It can be obvious with very concrete things. For drink you might draw a cup with some juice in it. But what to draw for a more abstract concept like tomorrow? My first thought when this came up was to try a picture of the sun rising and setting but for that to work the children would either have to understand the whole Copernican thing or be used to watch the sun come up every morning and set every night. To get the idea across I’d have to use some thing much more specific that they would recognise even if other people wouldn’t. For example if it were Monday I could draw someone swimming because every Tuesday they go swimming with the school.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-24 06:45 am (UTC)"So everyone who goes to the same exact school and has the same exact teacher and gets the same exact text book is taught the same exact language."
Except by the time we get to school, we've already learned to speak from our parents & others we grow up with. I doubt that'll ever change. And, as you say, even if people grow up together & learn to speak at the same time, they may not understand the same words the same way.
"it does not however state to impart information in a way so that someone else, whomever they might be, can understand it."
Maybe not in American Heritage, but in Merriam-Webster, 1 of the meanings given is "to transmit information, thought, or feeling so that it is satisfactorily received or understood," & the example they give is about 2 sides failing to communicate. Don't know if that's a hopeful sign or not. Still doesn't mean it's easy, of course.
Yes, the Tower of Babel story is in the Torah--near the beginning of the book of Genesis. It wasn't so much a punishment as a preventive measure, to keep humans from building a tower so high it would reach to Heaven.
"We create sub-languages, without realizing it sometimes, I think - and this causes communication to break down."
My 1st job after I moved to NYC was to edit standards written by committees. Often these standards contained not only the jargon of the people who would be using them but a kind of subjargon that had grown up among the committee members, without their even realizing it. I'd have to ask my contact if a term in the proposed standard was just jargon from their field or specific to the committee, & sometimes they'd say, "Oh. Yeah, we came up with that in our discussions, nobody else will know what it means." And it could be hard for them to think of how to say it so it would be understandable!
But up to a point, specialized terminology can be helpful or even necessary within a field. Medical language is more precise & specific than the way lay people talk about health & disease. It can express in a word or 2 what would take a long description/explanation to say in ordinary language. The problems come when medical personnel forget that most people don't know what those terms mean. And in some cases it doesn't matter that much--"hypertension" is no more precise than "high blood pressure."
And part of the problem is that diff't. people look at the same things diff'tly. When I was taking aikido, I learned better from some of the teachers than others, because they saw things from the same angle as me & described them in ways I understood easily. Other students learned better from the teachers I just couldn't follow.
So I don't know if there's a solution. In some ways I'm not sure there needs to be a solution, other than to accept that not everybody will understand what you say the same way. In fact, I need to take my own advice about this--I have a tendency to overexplain, because I get anxious that the people I'm talking to won't understand what I'm trying to say. I may have done that here...not too much, I hope.