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Analysis Of Internet Jargon
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An analysis of Internet jargon
Approximately 30 million people world-wide use the Internet and online
services daily. The Net
is growing exponentially in all areas, and a rapidly increasing number
of people are finding
themselves working and playing on the Internet. The people on the Net
are not all rocket scientists
and computer programmers; theyre graphic designers, teachers, students,
artists, musicians,
feminists, Rush Limbaugh-fans, and your next door neighbors. What these
diverse groups of people
have in common is their language. The Net community exists and thrives
because of effective written
communication, as on the net all you have available to express yourself
are typewritten words. If you
cannot express yourself well in written language, you either learn more
effective ways of
communicating, or get lost in the shuffle.
“Netspeak” is evolving on a national and international level. The
technological vocabulary once used
only by computer programmers and elite computer manipulators called
“Hackers,” has spread to all
users of computer networks. The language is currently spoken by people
on the Internet, and is
rapidly spilling over into advertising and business. The words “online,”
“network,” and “surf the net”
are occurring
more and more frequently in our newspapers and on
television. If youre like most
Americans, youre feeling bombarded by Netspeak. Television advertisers,
newspapers, and
international businesses have jumped on the “Information Superhighway”
bandwagon, making the
Net more accessible to large numbers of
not-entirely-technically-oriented people. As a result,
technological vocabulary is entering into non-technological
communication. For example, even the
archaic UNIX command “grep,” (an acronym meaning Get REpeated Pattern)
is becoming more
widely accepted as a synonym of “search” in everyday communication.
The argument rages as to whether Netspeak is merely slang, or a jargon
in and of itself. The
language is emerging based loosely upon telecommunications vocabulary
and computer jargons, with
new derivations and compounds of existing words, and shifts creating
different usages; all of which
depending quite heavily upon clippings. Because of these reasons, the
majority of Net-using linguists
classify Netspeak as a dynamic jargon in and of itself, rather than as a
collection of slang.
Linguistically, the most interesting feature of Netspeak is its
morphology. Acronyms and
abbreviations make up a large part of Net jargon. FAQ (Frequently Asked
Question), MUD
(Multi-User-Dungeon), and URL (Uniform Resource Locator) are some of the
most frequently seen
TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) on the Internet. General abbreviations
abound as well, in more
friendly and conversationally conducive forms, such as TIA (Thanks In
Advance), BRB (Be Right
Back), BTW (By The Way), and IMHO (In My Humble Opinion.) These
abbreviations can be
baffling to new users, and speaking in abbreviations takes some getting
used to. Once users are used
to them, though, such abbreviations are a nice and easy way of
expediting communication.
Derivation is another method by which many words are formed. The word
Internet itself is the word
“net” with the prefix “inter-” added to it. Another interesting example
is the word “hypertext,” used to
describe the format of one area of the Internet, the WWW (World Wide
Web). The WWW is
made up of millions of pages of text with “hotlinks” that allow the user
to jump to another page with
different information on it. “Hypertext,” derived by adding the prefix
“hyper-” to the word “text,”
produces the definition “a method of storing data through a computer
program that allows a user to
create and link fields of information at will and to retrieve the data
nonsequentially,” according to
Websters