Excited! 2: Words, Words, Words.
Words, words, words.
This story starts with a cubicle, ends with a treasure, and takes a detour along the way.
Many years ago—so long ago I'm hazy on the details—, we were cleaning out some old modular furniture in the office, and found a book, wedged in the back of one of the metal drawers. It had a faded green cloth cover, tiny gold embossed letters on the spine, a logo pressed on the front, and (presumably) a last name sharpied along the long edge of the collected pages. It looked something (exactly) like this:
At the time, I was a bit of a packrat, with a soft spot for old books. I owned a (rather useless) book on vacuum tube design I'd picked up for $0.50 at a library sale; for $1.50 at the same sale, I'd picked up a crumpled, thin hardcover on something called "human-computer interaction," well before I'd rediscover the field in grad school and take so many courses that my classmates thought I was in their program.
But THIS book, with its gold-embossed green cloth cover...how could anyone resist a title like that? The office was going to toss it! I claimed it. Naturally.
...annnnnd then forgot about it, more or less, until this week.
* * *
True confession: I'm a word nerd. This fact absolutely surprises precisely ...well, no one who knows me.
I've thanked people in correspondence for "gifting" me new words. When dusting the rust off my JavaScript skills, I made a Chrome extension that looks up words in Wordnik, my favorite dictionary. I've had to work hard to keep my composure when meeting famous lexicographers. Lexicographers.
(YOU GUYS, LEXICOGRAPHERS!!!)
A week ago, I fiiiiinally (I know!) read Abby Covert's excellent How To Make Sense of Any Mess, a wonderfully simply-written, all-purpose manual for designing solutions to information problems. One of the early steps in untangling information messes is figuring out what language to use. What do people call things? Do the people making a product call it the same thing as their customers? Words have different meanings to different people in different contexts—"stud" means different things in a hardware store, at a poker table, in a horse stable, and on a dating site—and ontology is the fancy word that we use to describe choosing a particular meaning for particular words within a particular context. Creating a lexicon of your domain language. Learning to understand, if not empathize, with people who work in that domain.
Despite learning new domain languages all the time on the job, it's easy to forget just how many there are, and how exciting it can be to learn the secret lingo of another culture, and all of a sudden, dang, you're seeing domain languages EVERYWHERE:
- A book on the language of landscape, by the eloquent Robert MacFarlane, more intriguing than it should have any right to be. "Seriously," writes your friend, "the way he marshals prose on the page is just delicious."
- A black hole of Wikipedia, where glossaries have their own category. And that category has subcategories of glossaries: Science. Religion. Sports. Music. Education. Arts. Games. Math. So! many! glossaries. You could pick any one of these and spend a week lost in the hypertext. (Did you know there's such a thing as mathematical folklore?) We're not even counting the overlapping categories of terminology and jargon.
- A book on your shelf, bound in green cloth with tiny gold lettering, which you've forgotten until now.
The United States Air Force Dictionary. Edited by Woodford Agee Heflin. 1956. Air University Press.
So many acronyms!
No, the irony of the previous owner's surname has not escaped me.
More pictures on Flickr.
What domain languages do you get excited about? Reply, or drop me a line on twitter. (And thanks again for subscribing!)
Many thanks to Lucy for the word-nerrrdy endorsement of LANDMARKS, and once again to rstevens for the feedback.
Yep, it's still February. Again, this is the part where I log progress on projects (anonymized with code names, because code names make EVERYTHING fun), in the style of Warren Ellis and the late BERG studio. How'd we do in the last week?
- [⋯] Making slow headway on ATREYU. The last two weeks have been a lot of administrative work and bug fixing, and wrapping my head around existing code. Another milestone deadline in two weeks, so this will be a rough one.
- [⋯] The cutoff for DAMERON is fast approaching! Need to finish a CV by late this week so that I can have time to work on the rest of it this weekend.
- [⋯] Sketched an outline for RIO GRANDE! Need to find some time for it this week.
- [✓] The paper for EOMAIA is off! Integrated the peer review notes, and fixed up the references.