Richard's Online Journal

Greetings and salutations. In case you were wondering, Richard Cobbett is a writer and journalist and producer of many other things involving words. He likes cats, hates spiders, and plays a lot of games. This is his website...
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Mar
11

PC Plus: World of Wordcraft

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Guess what game I was playing a lot of that month.

Where do the techie words we use every day come from? PC Plus 279 investigates the jargon files, from AAA to ZIP. Discover the etymologies and industry terms you never knew existed, from the Scunthorpe Problem to the size of a Nybble.

This was a fun article to write, even if I’m sure there’ll be at least one folk-etymology in there. I also managed to sneak in quite a few gags, which was a refreshing change from the norm. I love words (and highly recommend Bill Bryson’s books on the subject, especially Made In America) and it’s always good to know obscure little things that will trip you up in techie quizzes, such as where the word TWAIN actually comes from (it’s not an acronym) or the definition of ‘recursion’.

In retrospect, we should have left more space for the actual article part that runs along the bottom. When we planned out the page designs, we weren’t sure there’d be enough interesting stuff to say, but in the end it had to be cut down from about twice the length. It amuses me that while both ‘geek’ and ‘nerd’ are often seen as interchangeable, they in fact stem from completely opposite ends of some imaginary freak-curve. Still, no matter. I think it’s quite a fun little feature.

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