In another place, a word has raised its head - as used by me: usability. I came across it - though pals - as used by Jakob Neilsen in reference to his calling to webpage usability - weighing what is on the screen. Trouble is...I don't know what it means: the "ability to be used" sounds pretty close to either useful or functional to me...
I think - use, usable, useful, utility, useless, capacity, capabilites, functional - and I am thinking of a list of words that pre-date the web. Did a new word really have to be created? Was one?
I do know what the coining of a word like "usability" does - it creates an expert, a gap in the expertise of others, a billing stream and, who knows, down the road, maybe a bachalors degree my kids may take. It makes an industry. Not that I am slagging (or, indeed, praising) Jakob Neilsen. It's the industry thing. The gathering. Unmeasurable metrics. When I was a kid an industry was not tourism, it was not consulting, it was not even medicine. It was oil fed metal moving and making. It made sounds so loud you needed ear plugs. It was smelly like a gas station.
I don't know why this grates me. I am a big believer in new words for new things. The thing is I also want to keep using good old words, too. Look at the upper left of this page. The implication that kneeding dough is a matter of usability. But bread's been kneeded for thousands of years - how old is the word usability? Its root, usable, is medieval. But was anything assessed for its usability before the web? Spoons? Gaskets? Shoe eyelets? Due to the web swampings of an industry, even Google can't seem to tell me.
Comments
Steven Garrity - May 8, 2003 9:08 pm
Right on Al. Please bear with me as I quote myself quoting someone else quoting yet another (from Evolving Client Content, an article I wrote for A List Apart):
<blockquote class="quote">
<p>Neil Postman, in a 1990 address to the German Informatics Society, made reference to George Bernard Shaw's theory that "all professions are conspiracies against the common folk." The idea being that professionals construct complex proprietary language ("gobbledegook") in order to keep the common man from being able to understand, and therefore criticize their work. This phenomenon would be familiar to anyone who has ever been told by a tech support phone operator to "defrag your hard drive" and call back—by which time the operator's shift will long since have ended.</p></blockquote>
mrG - May 13, 2003 10:34 pm
I don't know where I first heard it or where it comes from, and it took me a while to find it through Google to be sure I had it correct, but I've always enjoyed the quote
"Philosophy is the systematic abuse of a terminology specifically designed for that purpose"
I run into word-salad generators all the time in my consulting; just today I concluded a lengthly flame fest with the webmaster for the OntarioLiberals.com website who was trying to hand me abuses of all sorts of terminology to excuse the design principles which led them to build a site where you cannot even contact the site owners unless you run the lastest MSIE. I was no more than done this and ran into another extremely long tirade from a Defender of Learnware trying to sell me on "<i>ideational scaffolding</i>" as an excuse to siphon precious (and dwindling) education funds into the pockets of Microsoft.
But as you can see from that quote, yes, the professional tactic of bamboozlement through opaque jargon is at least as old as the renaissance.
Roberto Martins - December 3, 2003 5:04 pm
The citation "Philosophy is the systematic abuse of a terminology specifically designed for that purpose" is a translation from the German. The original sentence is ascribed to the physicist Wolfgang Pauli:
"Philosophie ist der systematische Missbrauch einer eigens zu diesem Zweck entwickelten Terminologie".
http://www.walter-fendt.de/sprueche.htm
http://www.goethe.lb.bw.schule.de/humor/spruwitz.htm