The Jargon

Bill Gates has a blog, now. I don’t care that he calls it “GatesNotes”. It’s a blog.

We have talked about jargon before, here. But come on! What is the deal with Microsoft and their having to re-name everything?

You want to save a Web page so you can come back to it later? In Firefox, that’s called a Bookmark. In Safari, it’s known as a Bookmark. Google, in their new Chrome browser, refers to this technology as a Bookmark. Microsoft? Well, Microsoft still thinks these things are called Favorites.

I’m sorry, the IRS Web site is not one of my Favorites. It’s just a site that I may need again.

For years, the most popular computer language was BASIC. The Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. BASIC. B-A-S-I-C. It was included, free, with new PCs and new Apple-II’s and pretty much everything in the 1970s and 1980s. Microsoft again couldn’t leave well enough alone and developed versions of their own. Granted, these came with features and supported technologies the “real” language did not for a while. But mostly this was done to sell boxes. We saw this played out again and again, with the popular “C” language, the Java language and so on.

There is always going to be someone out there who can do it cheaper. Or someone who can add just a little small-f flash and sizzle, for only a few dollars more. But when you step away from the standards, you really are venturing out into uncharted territory. What good is it, really, to call your Web site “GatesNotes” if you then have to explain, every time that it really has nothing to do with Lotus’ awful e-mail/calendar/collaborative program? Or that it is a collection of His Gatesness’ random thoughts and photos from his many travels and adventures in the technology world for the last thirty years or so?

Wouldn’t it be so much easier to just say “Bill Gates now has a blog?”

This isn’t like the Twitter culture seeping into Facebook, with it’s @updates and #subjects as though everyone who is on Facebook will know, understand and appreciate these things. It’s misappropriation of the language for no real gain. Factor in the loss of productivity of a skillion people all explaining, “It’s like a blog...” and we’re probably in negative contributions to Society, aren’t we?

A couple of months ago, a guy came to me and asked that I put an image “inline” on his page. I did this and he wasn’t happy. He wanted it, you know, inline. He had the wrong word for a Web Guy. If he had used any other, I would have questioned him, asking just what it was he expected. This is worse. We have language to describe the idea of what Bill is doing--let’s use that. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich isn’t any better just because we call it a Visual Legume-and-Jelly-dot-net-sandwich-plus-plus.

Parents tell frustrated children to “Use your words”. That’s wrong. They should be saying “Use everyone’s words”.