English Language Innovation

There are times when the English language is one of the most frustrating things in my life – they tend to be the times when I am thinking about spellings with a dyslexic son. At other times I love the ever changes nature of the lexicon that we use.

The Post Office (of all people) has just released a report titled: Are you 404 when it comes to tech chat?

I’m not normally a huge fan of these things because they age so quickly, once its been published it’s already out of date. This one seems to be reasonable though, it’s interesting because it picks up on localised abbreviations too, the ones in the report relate to the London Oyster Card.

I’ve spent all of my working life in the IT language sub-culture, it’s interesting to see how this language is leaking into day-to-day common language.

This came to my attention recently as an example of what I mean, it uses a whole set of words and phrases that 10 years ago none of us had heard of, or if we had they probably had a different meaning. Today we understand all of the meanings:

George Carlin – Modern Man

For me it’s a great example of user innovation – people who use the language innovate it all of the time. The need for people to innovate is very strong, something those of us in IT do well to remember.

Over and out to all of you Code 18’s