The White Agency’s Arwen Whiting reflects on invented language in the digital industry
By Arwen Whiting (left), associate producer, The White Agency
Last week IFLS* dropped the word ‘petrichor’ on the Internet. Petrichor means ‘the scent of rain on the air’ and was invented by CSIRO scientists in 1964. If you’ve never heard the term before, but you instantly thought ‘oh yeah, the smell of rain’, perhaps we can assume scientific words don’t fall that quickly into everyday language.
50,000 people liked this article on IFLS within just a few days – likely more publicity than the scientists got from their academic journals in 1964! But how does this translate to the word actually entering our every day vernacular?
Inventing words isn’t just for Scientists these days, social media has taken over the mantle and is arguably having more success – think “selfie”, “bae” and “vape” (all of which are now listed in the Oxford Dictionary).
Forever in the thick of all things social media, our digital industry has developed a distinct claim on language too. We are surrounded by invented words, in addition to all the tech terms, phrases that sound fancy but have no real meaning, and acronyms we turn into verbs. This invented language of ours can only be described as ‘agile’ – with each iteration of the latest trends, technologies and buzzwords, we retain the lingo that works and quickly forget the redundant and naff.
There’s a constant flow of terms like ‘Twittersphere’, ‘Rich Media’, ‘Filter Bubble’, ‘Native Advertising’, and ‘Microblogging’ taking up the buzzword limelight, getting in the way of us learning practical tech terms. Often terms have a very short or very limited impact, bursting onto the scene with hopes of finding solid ground in the digital community, but never really going anywhere – think ‘Listicle’ ‘Showrooming’, ‘CPL’ (Cost Per Like), ‘SoLoMo’ and ‘Cloudsourcing’.
But there are words and phrases so ingrained in our digital lingo we barely notice that they’re there – think ‘CTAs’, ‘Bounce Rates’, ‘Geo-tag’ and ‘Active Relationships’. Whilst some newer terms like ‘Neuromorphics’ may not instantly take off in the same way a word like ‘Responsive’ has, the language is constantly evolving along with the latest strides in digital technology.
Yet with all this creativity, no one has managed to find a better name for the ‘The Internet of Things’. We must all be too busy verb-ifying ‘SEO’ and ‘GIF’ and adding ‘Architect’ and ‘Engineer’ to the end of our job descriptions!
…But at the end of the day, does this constantly changing language make the digital world an exclusive little club, difficult to break into and confusing to the outside world? Or are we just more efficient at communicating new and different things?
Will these digital-specific phrases and words seep out into the wild oceans of the Internet proper – eventually finding their way to our newsfeeds and everyday conversations?
Do we need all these shortened words and reappropriated verbs, or is it a symptom of our ‘millennial’ attention span – eager to cram as much content in with as little effort as possible. Do our fancy buzzwords just appear shiny and new, masking basic principles and concepts that didn’t need “buzz” to be useful?
Or are we really making strides in human culture as we know it, changing the way we interact with each other and constantly searching for better ways of defining this evolution?
Regardless of what the answers to these questions are, we’re definitely approaching a point where someone needs to make a Digital Industry equivalent of Urban Dictionary.
* IFuckingLoveScience, a Facebook page just shy of 20 million likes, is the mothership of scientific tidbits and genuinely interesting science news. The IFLS page not only excels in delivering pop-culture consumable, well-written articles, but also in making readers feel educated and worldly in their otherwise cat-meme-filled Facebook feed.